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UNDER THE TREES 


A Companion to 

“ Under the Trees and Elsewhere.” 


MY STUDY FIRE. 


BY 

HAMILTON WRIGHT MABIE. 

SECOND EDITION. 

Bound in boards with label, or in cloth 
with gilt top. 

Price of either style, $1.25. 


UNDER THE TREES 


AND ELSEWHERE 


BY 

HAMILTON WRIGHT MABIE 

AUTHOR OF MY STUDY FIRE,” “ NORSE STORIES RETOLD 
FROM THE EDDAS,” ETC., ETC. 




NEW YORK 

DODD, MEAD & COMPANY 


1891 




TSa3 53 



l / 


Copyright, 1891, 

BY 

DODD, MEAD & COMPANY. 


All rights reserved. 



V 


The out-of-door studies and meditations which 
make up this volume appeared at intervals during 
the past four years in the columns of The Christian 
Union. They are so closely akin in sentiment to 
the papers published last autumn, under the title 
“ My Study Fire,” that the general friendliness with 
which the indoor reveries were received has in- 
spired the hope that these out-of-door dreams and 
studies may find acceptance as a companion volume. 


March , 1891. 


H. W. M. 



CONTENTS 


CHAPTER 

PAGE 

I. 

An April Day, 

i 

II. 

Under the Apple Boughs, . 

7 

III. 

Along the Road — I 

12 

IV. 

Along the Road— II., .... 

17 

V. 

The Open Fields, 

23 

VI. 

Earth and Sky, 

28 

VII. 

The Mystery of Night, .... 

34 

VIII. 

Off Shore 

40 

IX. 

A Mountain Rivulet 

46 

X. 

The Earliest Insights, 

5 i 

XI. 

The Heart of the Woods, . 

58 

XII. 

Beside the River, .... 

66 

XIII. 

At the Spring, 

7 i 

XIV. 

On the Heights, 

76 

XV. 

Under College Elms, .... 

82 

XVI. 

A Summer Morning, .... 

vii 

88 


Vlll 

CONTENTS. 


CHAPTER 



PAGE 

XVII. 

A Summer Noon, 

. 

93 

XVIII. 

Eventide, 



98 

XIX. 

The Turn of the 

Tide 

103 

XX. 

In the Forest of 

Arden, I-XI., 

109 

XXI. 

An Undiscovered 

Island, I-VL, 

169 






UNDER THE TREES 

AND ELSEWHERE. 


CHAPTER I. 

AN APRIL DAY. 

My study has been a dull place of late ; even 
the open fire, which still lingers on the hearth, has 
failed to exorcise a certain gray and weary spirit 
which has somehow taken possession of the prem- 
ises. As I was thinking this morning about the 
best way of ejecting this unwelcome inmate, it sud- 
denly occurred to me that for some time past my 
study has been simply a workshop ; the fire has 
been lighted early and burned late, the windows 
have been closed to keep out all disturbing sounds, 
and the pile of manuscript on the table has steadily 
grown higher and higher. “ After all,” I said to 
myself, “ it is I that ought to be ejected.” Acting 
on this conclusion, and without waiting for the ser- 
vice of process of formal dislodgment, I have let 
the fire go out, opened the windows, locked the 
door, and put myself into the hands of my old 
friend, Nature, for refreshment and society. I find 


i 


2 


UNDER THE TREES. 


that I have come a little prematurely, although my 
welcome has been even warmer than it would have 
been later. 

“ This is what I like,” my old friend seemed to 
say. “ You have not waited until I have set 
my house in order and embellished my grounds. 
You have come because you love me even more 
than my surroundings. I have a good many friends 
who know me only frqm May to October : the rest 
of the year they give me cold glances of surprised 
recognition, or they pass me by without so much as 
a look. Their ardent devotion in summer fills me 
with a deep disdain ; their admiration for great 
masses of color, for high, striking effects, and for 
the general lavishness and prodigality of my pass- 
ing mood, betrays their lack of discernment, their 
defect of taste, and their slight acquaintance with 
myself. I should much prefer that they would leave 
my woods and fields untrodden, and not disturb my 
mountain solitudes with their ignorant and vulgar 
raptures. The people who really know me and 
love me seek me oftener at other seasons, when I 
am more at leisure, and can bid them to a more in- 
timate companionship. They come to understand 
my finer moods and deeper secrets of beauty ; the 
elusive loveliness which I leave behind me to lure 
on my true friends through the late autumn, they 
find and follow with the eye and heart of love ; the 
rare and splendid aspects in which I often discover 
my presence in midwinter they enjoy all the more 


AN APRIL DA Y. 


o 


because I have withdrawn myself from the gaze of 
the crowd ; and the first faint touches of color and 
soft breathings of life, which announce my return in 
the early spring, they greet with the deep joy of 
true lovers. Those only who discern the beauty of 
branches from which I have stripped the leaves to 
uncover their exquisite outline and symmetry, who 
can look over bare fields and into the faded copse 
and find there the elusive beauty which hides in 
soft tones and low colors, are my true friends ; all 
others are either pretenders or distant acquaint- 
ances.” 

I was not at all surprised to hear my old friend 
express sentiments so utterly at variance with 
those held by many people who lay claim to her 
friendship ; in • fact, they are sentiments which I 
find every year becoming more and more my own 
convictions. In every gallery of paintings you will 
find the untrained about the pictures on which the 
artist has lavished the highest colors from his 
palette ; those whose taste for art has had direction 
and culture will look for very different effects in 
the works which attract them. It is among the 
rich and varied low colors of this season, in wood 
and field, that a true lover of nature detects some 
of her rarest touches of loveliness ; the low western 
sun, falling athwart the bare boughs and striking a 
kind of subdued bloom into the brown hill-tops 
and across the furze and heather, sometimes reveals 
a hidden charm in the landscape which one seeks 


4 


UNDER THE TREES. 


in vain when skies are softer and the green roof 
has been stretched over the woodland ways. In 
fact, one can hardly lay claim to any intimacy with 
Nature until he loves her best when she discards 
her royalty, and, like Cinderella, clad only in the 
cast-off garments of sunnier days, she crouches be- 
fore the ashes of the faded year. ^The test of 
friendship is its fidelity when every charm of for- 
tune and environment has been swept away, and 
the bare, undraped character alone remains p if love 
still holds steadfast, and the joy of companionship 
survives in such an hour, the fellowship becomes a 
beautiful prophecy of immortality. To all profes- 
sions of love Nature applies this infallible test with 
a kind of divine impartiality. With the first note 
of the bluebird, under the brief flush of an April 
sky, her alluring invitation goes forth to the world ; 
day by day she deepens the blue of her summer 
skies and fills them with those buoyant clouds that 
float like dreams across the vision of the waking 
day ; night after night she touches the stars with a 
softer radiance, and breathes upon her roses so that 
they are eager for the dawn, that they may lay 
their hearts open to her gaze ; the forests take on 
more and more the lavish mood of the summer, 
until they have buried their great trunks in per- 
petual shade. The splendid pageant moves on, 
gathering its votaries as it passes from one marvel- 
ous change to another ; and yet the Mistress of the 
Revels is nowhere visible. The crowds press from 


AN APRIL DA Y. 


5 


point to point, peering into the depths of the 
woods and watching stealthily where the torrent 
breaks from its dungeon in the hills, and leaps, 
mad with joy, in the new-found liberty of light and 
motion ; but not a flutter of her garment betrays to 
the keenest eye the Presence which is the soul of 
all this visible, moving scene. 

And now there is a subtle change in the air ; 
premonitions of death begin to thrust themselves 
in the midst of the revelry ; there is a brief hush, a 
sudden glow of splendor, and, lo ! the pageant is 
seemingly at an end. The crowd linger a little, 
gather a few faded leaves, and depart ; a few — 
a very few — wait. Now that the throngs have van- 
ished and the revelry is over, they are conscious of 
a deep, pervading quietude ; these are days when 
something touches them with a sense of near and 
sacred fellowship ; Nature has cast aside her gifts, 
and given herself. For there is a something behind 
the glory of summer, and they only have entered 
into real communion with Nature who have learned 
to separate her from all her miracles of power and 
beauty ; who have come to understand that she 
lives apart from the singing of birds, the blossom- 
ing of flowers, and the waving of branches heavy 
with leaves. 

The Greeks saw some things clearly without 
seeing them deeply ; they interpreted through a 
beautiful mythology all the external phenomena of 
Nature. The people of the farther East, on the 


6 


UNDER THE TREES. 


other hand, saw more obscurely, but far more 
deeply ; they looked less at the visible things 
which Nature held out to them, and more into the 
mysteries of her hidden processes, her silent but 
universal mutations ; the subtle vanishings and re- 
appearings of her presence ; they seemed to hear 
the mighty loom on which the seasons are woven, 
to feel through some primitive but forgotten kin- 
ship the throes of the birth-hour, the vigils of 
suffering, and the agonies of death. Was there not 
in such an attitude toward Nature a hint of the only 
real fellowship with her ? 


CHAPTER II. 


UNDER THE APPLE BOUGHS. 

For weeks past I have been conscious of some 
mystery in the air ; there have been fleeting signs 
of secret communication between earth and sky, as 
if the hidden powers were in friendly league and 
some great concerted movement were on foot. 
There have been soft lights playing upon the ten- 
der grass on the lawn, and caressing those deli- 
cate hues through which each individual tree and 
shrub searches for its summer foliage ; the morn- 
ings have slipped so quietly in through the eastern 
gates, and the afternoons have vanished so softly 
across the western hills, that one could not but sus- 
pect a plot to avert attention and lull watchful eyes 
into negligence while all things were made ready 
for the moment of revelation. At times a subdued 
light has filled the broad arch of heaven, and, later, 
a fringe of rain has moved gently across the low 
hills and fallow fields, rippling like a wave from 
that upper sea which hangs invisible in golden 
weather, but becomes portentous and vast as the 
nether seas when the clouds gather and the celes- 
tial watercourses are unlocked. One day I thought 
I saw signs of a falling out between the conspira- 


7 


8 


UNDER THE TREES. 


tors, and I set myself to watch for some disclosure 
which might escape from one side or the other in 
the frankness of anger. The earth was sullen and 
overcast, the sky dark and forbidding, the clouds 
rolled together and grew black, and the shadows 
deepened upon the grass. At last there was a 
vivid flash of lightning, a crash of thunder, and the 
sudden roar of rain. “ Now,” I said to myself, “ I 
shall learn what all this secrecy has been about.” 
But I was doomed to disappointment ; after a few 
minutes of angry expostulation the sky suddenly 
uncovered itself, the clouds piled themselves 
against the horizon and disclosed their silver lin- 
ings, and over the whole earth there spread a broad 
smile, as if the hypocritical performance had been 
part of the original deception. I am confident 
now that it was, for that brief drenching of trees 
and sward was almost the last noticeable prepara- 
tion before the curtain rose. The next day there 
was a deep, unbroken quiet across our piece of 
world, as if a fragment of eternity had been quietly 
slipped into the place of one of our brief, noisy 
days. The trees stood motionless, as if awaiting 
some signal, and I listened in vain for that inarticu- 
late and half-heard murmur of coming life which, 
day and night, had filled my thoughts these past 
weeks, and set the march of the hours to a sublime 
rhythm. 

The next morning a faint perfume stole into my 
room. I rose hastily, ran to the window, and lo ! 


UNDER THE APPLE BOUGHS. 


9 


the secret was out : the apple trees were in bloom ! 
Three days later, and the miracle so long in prepa- 
ration was accomplished ; the slowly rising tide 
of life had broken into a foam of blossoms and 
buried the world in a billowy sea. There will come 
days of greater splendor than this, days of deeper 
foliage, of waving grain and ripening fruit, but no 
later day will eclipse this vision of paradise which 
lies outspread from my window ; life touches to-day 
the zenith of its earliest and freshest bloom ; to- 
morrow the blossoms will begin to sift down from 
the snowy branches, and the great movement of 
summer will advance again ; but for one brief day 
the year pauses and waits, reluctant to break the 
spell of this perfect hour, to mar by the stir of a 
single leaf the stainless loveliness of this revelation 
of nature’s unwasted youth. 

I do not care to look through these great masses 
of bloom ; it is enough simply to live in an hour 
which brings such an overflow of beauty from the 
ancient fountains ; but nature herself lures one to 
deeper thoughts, and, through the vision which 
spreads like a mirage over the landscape, hints at 
some hidden loveliness at the root of this riotous 
blossoming, some diviner vision for the eye of the 
spirit alone. “ Look,” she seems to say, as I stand 
and gaze with unappeased hunger of soul, “ this 
is my holida}\ In the coming weeks I have a whole 
race to feed, and over the length of the world men 
are imploring my help. They do their little share 


IO 


UNDER THE TREES. 


of work, and while they wait, waking and sleeping, 
anxiously watching winds and clouds, I vitalize 
their toil and turn all my forces to their bidding. 
The labor of the year is at hand and on its thresh- 
old I take this holiday. To-day I give you a 
glimpse of paradise ; a garden in which all manner 
of loveliness blooms simply from the overflow of 
life, without thought, or care, or toil. This was 
my life before men came with their cries of hunger 
and nakedness ; this shall be my life again when 
they have passed beyond. This which lies before 
you like a dream is a glimpse of life as it is in me, 
and shall be in you ; immortal, inexhaustible full- 
ness of power and beauty, overflowing in frolic 
loveliness. This shall be to you a day out of 
eternity, a moment out of the immortal youth to 
which all true life comes at last, and in which it 
abides.’' 

I cannot say that I heard these words, and yet 
they were as real to me as if they had been audible ; 
in all fellowship with Nature silence is deeper and 
more real than speech. As I stood meditating on 
these deep things that lie at the bottom of this sea 
of bloom, I understood why men in all ages have 
connected the flowering of the apple with their 
dreams of paradise ; I saw at a glance the immor- 
tal symbolism of these blossoming fields and hill- 
sides. I did not need to lift my eyes to look upon 
that garden of Hesperides, lying like a dream of 
heaven under the golden western skies, whence 


UNDER THE APPLE BOUGHS. H 

Heracles brought back the fruit of Juno ; I asked 
no aid of Milton’s imagination to see the mighty 
hero in 

. . . the gardens fair 

Of Hesperus and his daughters three. 

That sing about the golden tree ; 

and as I gazed, the vision of that other and nobler 
hero came before me, whose purity is more to us 
than his prowess, and who waits in Avilion, the 
“ Isle of Apples,” for the call that shall summon 
him back from Paradise. 

I am going a long way 
With these thou seest — if indeed I go 
(For all my mind is clouded with a doubt) — 

To the island-valley of Avilion ; 

Where falls not hail, or rain, or any snow, 

Nor even wind blows loudly ; but it lies 
Deep-meadow’d, happy, fair with orchard lawns 
And bowery hollows crown’d with summer sea, 

Where I will heal me of my grievous wound. 


CHAPTER III. 


ALONG THE ROAD. 


Since I turned the key on my study I have 
almost forgotten the familiar titles on which my 
eye rested whenever I took a survey of my book- 
shelves. Those friends stanch and true, with whom 
I have held such royal fellowship when skies were 
chill and winds were cold, will not forget me, nor 
shall I become unfaithful to them. I have gone 
abroad that I may return later with renewed zest and 
deeper insight to my old companionships. Books 
and nature are never inimical ; they mutually speak 
for and interpret each other ; and only he who 
stands where their double light falls sees things in 
true perspective and in right relations. 

The road along whose winding course I have 
been making a delightful pilgrimage to-day has 
the double charm of natural beauty and of hu- 
man association ; it is old, as age is reckoned in 
this new world ; it has grown hard under the 
tread of sleeping generations, and the great 
figures of history have passed over it in their jour- 
neys between the two great cities which mark its 


12 


ALONG THE ROAD— I. 




limits. In the earlier days it was the king’s high- 
way, and along its up-hill and down-dale course the 
battalions of royal troops marched and counter- 
marched to the call of bugles that have gone silent 
these hundred years and more. It is a road of 
varied fortunes, like many of those who have passed 
over it ; it is sometimes rich in all manner of price- 
less possessions, and again it is barren, poverty- 
stricken and desolate. It climbs long hills, some- 
times in a roundabout, hesitating, half-hearted way, 
and sometimes with an abrupt and breathless 
ascent ; at the summit it seems to pause a moment 
as if to invite the traveler to survey the splendid 
domain which it commands. On one side, in such 
a restful moment, one sees the wide circle of waters, 
stretching far off to a horizon which rests on clus- 
ters of islands and marks the limits of the world ; 
in the foreground, and sweeping around the other 
points of the compass, a landscape rich in foliage, 
full of gentle undulations, and dotted here and 
there with fallow fields, spreads itself like another 
sea that has been hushed into sudden immutability, 
and then sown, every wave and swell of it, with the 
seeds of exhaustless fertility. 

From such points of eminence as these the road 
sometimes runs with hurried descent, as if longing 
for solitude, into the heart of the woodlands, and 
there winds slowly and solemnly under the over- 
shadowing branches ; there are no fences here, and 
the sharp lines of separation between road-bed and 


14 


UNDER THE TREES. 


forest were long ago erased in that quiet usurpa- 
tion of man’s work, which Nature never fails to 
make the moment she is left to herself. The 
ancient spell of the woods is unbroken in this leafy 
solitude, and no traveler in whom imagination sur- 
vives can hope to escape it. The deep breathings 
of primeval life are almost audible, and one feels in 
a quick and subtle perception the long past which 
unites him with the earliest generations and the 
most remote ages. 

Passing out from this brief worship under the 
arches of the most venerable roof in Christendom, 
the road takes on a frolic mood and courts the 
open meadows and the flooding sunshine ; green, 
sweet, and strewn with wild flowers, the open fields 
call one from either side, and arrest one’s feet at 
every turn with solicitations to freedom and joyous- 
ness. The white clouds in the blue sky and the long 
sweep of these radiant meadows conspire together 
to persuade one that time has strayed back to its 
happy childhood again, and that nothing remains of 
the old activities but play in these immortal fields. 
Here the carpet is spread over which one runs with 
childish heedlessness, courting the disaster which 
brings him back to the breast of the old mother, 
and makes him feel once more the warmth and 
sweetness out of which all strength and beauty 
spring. A little brook crosses the road under a 
rattling bridge, and wanders on across the fields, 
limpid and rippling, running its little strain of music 


ALONG THE ROAD— I. 


*5 


through the silence of the meadows. Its voice is 
the only sound which breaks the stillness, and that 
itself seems part of the solitude. By day the clouds 
marshal their shadows on it, and when night comes 
the heavens sow it with stars, until it flows like a 
dissolving belt of sky through the fragrant dark- 
ness. Sometimes, as I have come this wa}?' after 
nightfall, I have heard its call across the invisible 
fields, and in the sound I have heard I know not 
what of deep and joyous mystery ; the long-past 
and the far-off future whispering together, under 
cover of the night, of those things which the stars 
remember from their youth, and to which they look 
forward in some remote cycle of their shining. 

Past old and well-worked farms, into which the 
toil and thrift of generations have gone, the old 
road leads me, and brings my thoughts back from 
elemental forces and primeval ages to these later 
centuries in which human life has overlaid these 
hills and vales with rich memories. Wherever man 
goes Nature makes room for him, as if prepared for 
his coming, and ready *to put her mighty shoulder 
to the wheel of ‘his prosperity. The old fences, 
often decayed and fallen, are not spurned ; the 
movement of universal life does not flow past them 
and leave them to rot in their ugliness ; year by year 
time stains them into harmony with the rocks, and 
every summer a wave out of the great sea of life 
flings itself over them, and leaves behind some 
slight and seemly garniture of moss and vine. The 


I6 


UNDER THE TREES. 


old farmhouses have grown into the landscape, and 
the hurrying road widens its course, and sometimes 
makes a long detour, that it may unite these outly- 
ing folk with the great world. There stands the 
old school-house, sacred to every traveler who has 
learned that childhood is both a memory and a 
prophecy of heaven. One pauses here, and hears, 
in the unbroken stillness, the rush of feet that have 
never grown weary with travel, and the clamor of 
voices through which immortal youth still shouts to 
the kindred hills and skies. Into those windows 
nature throws all manner of invitations, and 
through them she gets only glances of recognition 
and longing. There are the fields, the woods, and 
the hills in one perpetual rivalry of charm ; the 
bird sings in the bough over the window, and on 
still afternoons the brook calls and calls again. 
Here one feels anew the eternal friendship between 
childhood and Nature, and remembers that they only 
can abide in that fellowship who carry into riper 
years the self-forgetfulness, the sweet unconscious- 
ness, the open mind and heart of a child. 


CHAPTER IV. 


ALONG THE ROAD. 

II. 

I have found that walking stimulates observa- 
tion and opens one’s eyes to movements and ap- 
pearances in earth and sky, which ordinarily escape 
attention. The constant change of landscape which 
attends even the slow progress of a loitering gait 
puts one on the alert for discoveries of all kinds, 
and prompts one to suspect every leafy covert and 
to peer into every wooded recess with the expecta- 
tion of surprising Nature as Action surprised Diana 
— in the moment of uncovered loveliness. On the 
other hand, when one lounges by the hour in the 
depths of the forest, or sits, book in hand, under 
the knotted and familiar apple tree, on a summer 
afternoon, the faculty of observation is lulled into 
a dreamless sleep ; one ceases to be far enough 
away from Nature to observe her ; one becomes 
part of the great, silent movements in the midst of 
which he sits, mute and motionless, while the hours 
slip by with the peace of eternity already upon 
them. 

When I reached the end of my walk, and paused 


17 


1 8 UNDER THE TREES. 

for a moment before retracing my steps, I was con- 
scious of the inexhaustible richness of the world 
through which I had come ; a thousand voices had 
spoken to me, and a thousand sights of wonder 
moved before me ; I was awake to the universe 
which most of us see only in broken and unintelli- 
gent dreams. Through all this realm of truth and 
poetry men have passed and repassed these many 
years, I said to myself ; and I began to wonder 
how many of those now long asleep really saw or 
heard this great glad world of sun and summer ! 
I began slowly to retrace my steps, and as I reached 
the summit of the hill and looked beyond I saw 
the cattle standing knee-deep in the brook that 
loiters across the fields, and I heard the faint 
bleating of sheep borne from a distant pasturage. 

These familiar sights and sounds touched me 
with a sudden pathos; there is nothing in human 
associations so venerable, so familiar, as the lowing 
of the home-coming kine and the bleating of the 
flocks. They carry one back to the first homes and 
the most ancient families. Older than history, 
more ancient than civilization, are these familiar 
tones which unite the low-lying meadows and the 
upland pastures with the fire on the hearth-stone 
and the nightly care of the fold. When the 
shadows deepen over the country-side, the oldest 
memories are revived and the oldest habits recalled 
by the scenes about the farm-house. The same 
offices fall to the husbandman, the same sights re- 


ALONG THE ROAD— II. 


19 


veal themselves to the housewife, the same sounds, 
mellow with the resonance of uncounted centuries, 
greet the ears of the children as in the most primi- 
tive ages. 

The highway itself stands as a memorial of the 
most venerable customs and the most ancient 
races. As I lift my eyes from its beaten road-bed, 
and look out upon it through the imagination, it 
escapes all later boundaries and runs back through 
history to the very dawn of civilization ; it marks 
the earliest contact of men with a world which was 
wrapped in mystery. The hour that saw a second 
home built by human hands heard the first footfall 
on the first highway. That narrow foot-path led 
to civilization, and has broadened into the highway 
because human fellowships and needs have multi- 
plied and directed the countless feet that have 
beaten it into permanency. Every new highway 
has been a new bond between Nature and men, a 
new evidence of that indissoluble fellowship into 
which they are forever united. 

I have sometimes tried to recall in imagination 
the world of Nature before a human voice had 
broken the silence or a human foot left its impress 
on the soil ; but when I remember that what I see 
in this sweep of force and beauty is largely what I 
myself put into the vision, that Nature without the 
human ear is soundless, and without the human 
eye colorless, I understand that what lies spread 
before me never was until a human soul confronted 


20 


UNDER THE TREES. 


it and became its interpreter. This radiant world 
upon which I look was without form and void until 
the earliest man brought to the vision of it that cre- 
ative power within himself which touched it with 
form and color and relations not its own. Nature 
is as incomplete and helpless without man as man 
would be without Nature. He brought her varied 
and inexhaustible beauty, and clothed her with a 
garment woven on we know not what looms of divine 
energy ; and she fed, sheltered, and strengthened 
him for the life which lay before him. Together 
they have wrought from the first hour, and civiliza- 
tion, with all the circle of its arts, is their joint 
handiwork. 

In the atmosphere of our rich modern fellowship 
with Nature, the unwritten poetry to which every 
open heart falls heir, we forget our earliest depend- 
ence on the great mother and the lessons she 
taught when men gathered about her knee in the 
childhood of the world. Not a spade turned the 
soil, not an ax felled a tree, not a path was made 
through the forest, that did not leave, in the man 
whose arm put forth the toil, some moral quality 
In the obstacles which she placed in their pathway 
in the difficulties with which she surrounded their 
life, the wise mother taught her children all the 
lessons which were to make them great. It was nc 
easy familiarity which she offered them, no careles* 
bestowal of bounty upon dependents ; she met them 
as men, and offered them a perpetual alliance upon 


ALONG THE ROAD— II. 


21 


such terms as great and equal sovereigns proffer 
and accept. She gave much, but she asked even 
more than she offered, and in the first moment of 
intercourse she struck in men that lofty note of 
sovereignty which has never ceased to thrill the race 
with mysterious tones of power and prophecy. 
Men have stood erect and fearless in the presence 
of the most awful revelations of the forces of 
Nature, affirming by their very attitude a supremacy 
.of spirit which no preponderance of power can 
overshadow. Face to face through all his history 
man has stood with Nature, and to each generation 
she has opened some new page of her inexhaustible 
story. Beginning in the hardest toil for the most 
material rewards, this fellowship has steadily added 
one province of knowledge and intimacy after 
another, until it has become inclusive of the most 
delicate and hidden recesses of character as well as 
those which are obvious and primary. In response 
to spirits which have continually come into a closer 
contact with her life, Nature has added to her gifts 
of food and wine, poetry and art, far-reaching 
sciences, occult wisdoms and skills ; she has invited 
the greatest to become her ministers, and has 
rewarded their unselfish service by sharing with 
them the mighty forces that sleep and awake at her 
bidding ; one after another the poets of truest gift 
have forsaken the beaten paths of cities and men, 
and found along her untrodden ways the vision that 
never fades ; her voice, now that men begin to 


22 


UNDER THE TREES . 


understand it again as their forefathers understood 
it, is a voice of worship. So, from their first work 
for food and shelter, men have steadily won from 
Nature gifts of insight and knowledge and prophecy, 
until now the mightiest secrets are whispered by the 
trees to him who listens, and the winds sometimes 
take up the burden of prophecy and sing of a 
fellowship in which all truth shall be a common 
possession. 

As I walk along the old highway, the deepening, 
shadows touch the familiar landscape with mystery ; 
one landmark after another vanishes until the 
lights in the scattered farm-houses gleam like re- 
flected constellations. A deep silence fills the 
great heavens and broods over the wide earth; all 
things have become dim and strange ; and yet I 
feel no loneliness in the midst of this star-lit soli- 
tude. The heavens shining over me, and the scat- 
tered household fires declare to me that fellowship 
of light in which Nature holds out her hand to man 
and leads him, step by step, to the unspeakable 
splendors of her central sun. 


CHAPTER V. 


THE OPEN FIELDS. 

One of the sights upon which my eyes restoften- 
est and with deepest content is a broad sweep of 
meadow slowly climbing the western sky until it 
pauses at the edge of a noble piece of woodland. 
It is a playground of wind and flowers and waving 
grasses. There are, indeed, days when it lies cold 
and sad under inhospitable skies, but for the most 
part the heavens are in league with cloud and sun to 
protect its charm against all comers. When the 
turf is fresh, all the promise of summer is in its 
tender green ; a little later, and it is sown thick 
with daisies and buttercups ; and as the breeze 
plays upon it these frolicsome flowers, which have 
known no human tending, seem to chase each other 
in endless races over the whole expanse. I have 
seen them run breathlessly up the long slope, 
and then suddenly turn and rush pell-mell down 
again.. If the wind had only stopped for a moment 
its endless gossip with the leaves, |I am sure I 
should have heard the gleeful shouts, the sportive 
cries, of these vagrant flowers whose spell is rewoven 
over every generation of children, and whose un- 


23 


24 


UNDER THE TREES . 


studied beauty and joy recall, with every summer, 
some of the clews which most of us have lost in our 
journey through life. Even as I write, I see the 
white and yellow heads tossing to and fro in a mood 
of free and buoyant being, which has for me, face 
to face with the problems of living, an unspeakable 
pathos. 

What a depth of tender color fills the arch of 
heaven as it bends over this playground of the 
blooming and beauty-laden forces of nature ! The 
great summer clouds, shaping their courses to in- 
visible harbors across the trackless aerial sea, love 
to drop anchor here and slowly trail their mighty 
shadows, vainly striving for something that shall 
make them fast. The winds, that have come roar- 
ing through the woodlands, subdue their harsh 
voices and linger long in their journey across this 
sunny expanse. It is true, they sing no lullabies as 
in the hollow under the hill where they themselves 
often fall asleep, but the music to which they move 
has a magical cadence of joy in it, and sets our 
thought to the dancing mood of the flowers. 

Sometimes, on quiet afternoons, when the great 
world of work has somehow seemed to drop its 
burdens into space, and carries nothing but rest 
and quietude along its journey under the summer 
sky, I have seen a pageant in the open fields that 
has made me doubt whether a dream had not taken 
me unawares. I have seen the first sweet flowers 
of spring rise softly out of the grass where they 


.THE OPEN FIELDS. 


25 


had been hiding, and call gently to each other, as 
if afraid that a single loud word would dissolve the 
charm of sun and warm breeze for which they had 
waited so long. After their dreamless sleep of 
months, these beautiful children of Mother Earth 
seemed almost afraid to break the stillness from 
which they had come, and strayed about noiselessly, 
with subdued and lovely mien, exhaling a perfume 
as delicate as themselves. Then, with a rush and 
shout, the summer flowers suddenly burst upon the 
scene, overflowing with life and merriment ; in law- 
less troops they ran hither and thither, flinging 
echoes of their laughter over the whole country-side, 
and soon overshadowing entirely their older and 
more sensitive fellows ; these, indeed, soon vanish 
altogether, as if lonely and out of place under the 
broad glare and high colors of midsummer. And 
now for weeks together the game went on without 
pause or break ; the revelry grew fast and furious, 
until one suspected that some night the Bacchic 
throng had passed that way and left their mood of 
wild and lawless frolic behind. 

At last a softer aspect spread itself over the 
glowing sky and earth. The nights grew vocal 
with the invisible chorus of insect life ; there was 
a mellow splendor in the moonlight, which touched 
the distant hills and wide-spreading waters with a 
pathetic prophecy of change. \ And now, ripe, 
serene, and rich with the accumulated beauty of 
the summer, the autumn flowers appeared. Their 
movement was like the stately dances of olden 


26 


UNDER THE TREES. 


times ; youth and its overflow were gone forever ; 
but in the hour of maturity there remained a noble 
beauty, which touched all imaginations and com- 
municated to all visible things a splendor of which 
the most radiant hours of early summer had been 
only faintly prophetic. ! In the calm of these golden 
days the autumn flowers reigned with a more than 
regal state, and when the first cold breath of winter 
touched them, they fell from their great estate 
silently and royally as if their fate were matched to 
their rank. And now the fields were bare once 
more. 

From such a dream as this I often awake joy- 
fully to find the drama still in its first act, and to 
feel still before me the ever-deepening interest and 
ever-widening beauty of the miracle play to which 
Nature annually bids us welcome. Across this 
noble playground, with its sweep of landscape and 
its arch of sky, I often wander with no companions 
but the flowers, and with no desire for other fellow- 
ship. Here, as in more secluded and quiet places, 
Nature confides to those, who love her, some deep 
and precious truths never to be put into words, but 
ever after to rise at times over the horizon of 
thought like vagrant ships that Come and go against 
the distant sea line, or like clouds that pass along 
the remotest circle of the sky as it sleeps upon the 
hills. The essence of play is the unconscious over- 
flow of life that seeks escape in perfect self-forget- 
fulness. There is no effort in it, no whip of the 
will driving the unwilling energies to an activity 


THE OPEN FIELDS. 


27 


from which they shrink ; one plays as the bird 
sings and the brook runs and the sun shines — not 
with conscious purpose, but from the simple over- 
flow. In this sense Nature never works, she is 
always at play. In perfect unconsciousness, with- 
out friction or effort, her mightiest movements nre 
made and her sublimest tasks accomplished. 
Throughout the whole range of her activity one 
never comes upon any trace of effort, any sign of 
weariness ; one is always impressed — as Ruskin 
said long ago of works of genius — that he is stand- 
ing in the presence, not of a great effort, but of a 
great power ; that what has been done is only a 
single manifestation of the play of an inexhaustible 
force. There is somewhere in the universe an in- 
finite fountain of life and beauty which overflows 
and floods all worlds with divine energy and loveli- 
ness. When the tide recedes it pauses but a mo- 
ment, and then the music of its returning waves is 
heard along all shores, and its shining edges move 
irresistibly on until they have bathed the roots of 
the solitary flower on the highest Alp. 

It is this divine method of growth which Nature 
opposes to our mechanisms ; it is this inexhaustible 
life, overflowing in unconsciousness and boundless 
fulness, that she forever reveals. The truth which 
underlies these two great facts needs no application 
to human life. Blessed, indeed, are they who live 
in it, and have caught from it something of the joy, 
the health, and the perennial beauty of Nature. 


CHAPTER VI. 


EARTH AND SKY. 

In nature, as in art, it is the sky which makes the 
landscape. Given the identical fields, woods, and 
retreating hills, and every change of sky, every 
modulation of light, will produce a new landscape ; 
in light and atmosphere are concealed those mys- 
teries of color, of distance, and of tone which clothe 
the changeless features of the visible world with 
infinite variety and charm. This fruitful marriage 
of the upper and the lower firmaments is perhaps 
the oldest fact known to men ; it was the earliest 
discovery of the first observer, it still is the most 
illusive and beautiful mystery in nature. The most 
ancient mythologies began with it, the latest books 
of science and natural observation are still dealing 
with it. Myths that are older than history portray 
it in lofty symbolism or in splendid histories that 
embody the primitive ideals of divinity and hu- 
manity ; the latest poets and painters would fain 
touch their verse or their canvas with some lumi- 
nous gleam from the heart of this perpetual miracle. 
The unbroken procession of the seasons changes 
month by month the relations of earth and sky ; day 
and night all the water-courses of the world rise in 
28 


EARTH AND SKY. 


2 9 


invisible moisture to a fellowship with the birds that 
have passed on swift wing above their currents ; 
the great outlying seas, that sound the notes of 
their vast and passionate unrest upon the shores of 
every continent, are continually drawn upward to 
swell the invisible upper ocean which, out of its 
mighty life, feeds every green and fruitful thing 
upon the bosom of the earth. This movement of 
the oceans upon the continents through the illimit- 
able channels of the sky is, in some ways, the most 
mysterious and the most sublime of those miracles 
which each day testify to the presence and majesty 
of that Spirit behind Nature of whom the greatest 
of modern poets thought when he wrote : 

Thus at the roaring loom of time I ply 

And weave for God the robe thou seest Him by. 

The vast inland grain fields, that stretch in un- 
broken procession from horizon to horizon, have 
the seas at their roots, not less truly than the fertile 
soil out of which they spring ; the verdure upon 
the mountain ranges, that keep unbroken solitude 
at the heart of the continents, speaks forever of the 
distant oceans which nourish it, and spread it like 
a vesture over the barren heights. No traveler, 
deep in the recesses of the remotest inland, ever 
passes beyond the voice of that encircling ocean 
which never died out of the ears of the ancient 
Ulysses in the first Odyssey of wandering. 

Two months ago the apple trees were white with 


3 ° 


UNDER THE TREES . 


the foam of the upper sea ; to-day the roses have 
brought into my little patch of garden the hues with 
which sun and sea proclaimed their everlasting 
marriage in the twilight of yester even. In the 
deep, passionate heart of these splendid flowers, 
fragrant since they bloomed in Sappho’s hand cen- 
turies ago, this sublime wedlock is annually cele- 
brated ; earth and sky meet and commingle in this 
miracle of color and sweetness, and when I carry 
this lovely flower into my study all the poets fall 
silent ; here is a depth of life, a radiant outcome 
from the heart of mysteries, a hint of unimagined 
beauty, such as they have never brought to me in 
all their seeking. They have had their visions and 
made them music ; they have caught faint echoes 
of rushing seas and falling tides ; the shadows of 
mountains have fallen upon them with low whisper- 
ings of unspeakable things hidden in the unexplored 
recesses of their solitudes ; they have searched the 
limitless arch of heaven when it was sown with 
stars, and glittered like “ an archangel full pano- 
plied against a battle day”; but in all their quest 
the sublime unity of Nature, the fellowship of force 
with force, of sea with sky, of moisture with light, 
of form with color, has found at their hands no such 
transcendent demonstration as this fragile rose, 
which to-night brings from the great temple to this 
little shrine the perfume and the royalty of obedi- 
ence to the highest laws, and reverence for the 
divinest mysteries. Here sky and earth and sea 


EARTH AND SKY. 


31 


meet in a union which no science can dissolve, be- 
cause God has joined them together. Could I but 
penetrate the mystery which lies at the heart of this 
fragile flower, I should possess the secret of the 
universe ; I should understand the ancient miracle 
which has baffled wisdom from the beginning and 
will not discover itself to the end of time. 

If I permit my thought to rest upon this fragrant 
flower, to touch petal and stem and root, and unite 
them with the vast world in which, by a universal 
contribution of force, they have come to maturity, 
I find myself face to face with the oldest and the 
deepest questions men have ever sought to answer. 
Elements of earth and sea and sky are blended here 
in one of those forms of radiant and vanishing 
beauty with which the unseen life of Nature crowns 
the years in endless and inexhaustible profusion. 
As it budded and opened into full flower in the 
garden, how complete it seemed in itself, and how 
isolated from all other visible things ! But in 
reality how dependent it was, how entirely the crea- 
tion of forces as far apart as earth and sky ! The 
great tide from the Unseen cast it fora moment into 
my possession ; for an hour it has filled a human 
home with its far-brought sweetness ; to-morrow it 
will fall apart and return whence it came. As I look 
into its heart of passionate color, the whole visible 
universe, that seems so fixed and stable, becomes im- 
material, evanescent, vanishing ; it is no longer a 
permanent order of seas and continents and 


3 2 


UNDER THE TREES. 


rounded skies ; it is a vision painted by an unseen 
hand against a background of mystery. Dead, 
cold, unchangeable as I see it in the glimpses of a 
single hour, it becomes warm, vital, forever chang- 
ing as I gaze upon it from the outlook of the cen- 
turies. It is the momentary creation of forces that 
stream through it in endless ebb and flow, that are 
to-day touching the sky with elusive splendor, and 
to-morrow springing in changeful loveliness from 
the depths of earth. The continents are trans- 
formed into the seas that encircle them ; the seas 
rise into the skies that overarch them ; the skies 
mingle with the earth, and send back from the up- 
lifted faces of flowers greetings to the stars they 
have deserted. Mountains rise and sink in the 
sublime rhythm to which the movement of the uni- 
verse is set ; that song without words still audible 
in the sacred hour when the morning stars an- 
nounce the day, and the birds match their tiny 
melodies with the universal harmony. 

In the unbroken vision of the centuries all things 
are plastic and in motion ; a divine energy surges 
through all ; substantial for a moment here as a 
rock, fragile and vanishing there as a flower ; but 
everywhere the same, and always sweeping onward 
through its illimitable channel to its appointed end. 
It is this vital tide on which the universe gleams 
and floats like a mirage of immutability ; never the 
same for a single moment to the soul that contem- 
plates it : a new creation each hour and to every 


EARTH AND SKY. 


33 


eye that rests upon it. No dead mechanism moves 
the stars, or lifts the tides, or calls the flowers from 
their sleep ; truly this is the garment of Deity, 
and here is the awful splendor of the Perpetual 
Presence. It is the old story of the Greek Proteus 
translated into universal speech. It is the song of 
the Persian poet : 

The sullen mountain, and the bee that hums, 

A flying joy, about its flowery base, 

Each from the same immediate fountain comes, 

And both compose one evanescent race . 

There is no difference in the texture fine 

That’s woven through organic rock and grass, 

And that which thrills man’s heart in every line, 

As o’er its web God’s weaving fingers pass. 

The timid flower that decks the fragrant field, 

The daring star that tints the solemn dome, 

From one propulsive force to being reeled; 

Both keep one law and have a single home. 


CHAPTER VII. 


THE MYSTERY OF NIGHT. 

Every day two worlds lie at my door and invite 
me into mysteries as far apart as darkness and 
light. These two realms have nothing in common 
save a certain identity of form ; color, relation, dis- 
tance, arc lost or utterly changed. In the vast 
fields of heaven a still more complete and sublime 
transformation is wrought. It is a new hemisphere 
which hangs above me, with countless fires light- 
ing the awful highways of the universe, and guid- 
ing the daring and reverent thought as it falters in 
the highest empyrean. The mind that has come 
into fellowship with Nature is subtly moved and 
penetrated by the decline of light and the oncom- 
ing of darkness. As the sun is replaced by the 
stars, so is the hot, restless, eager spirit of the day 
replaced by the infinite calm and peace of the 
night. The change does not come abruptly or, 
with the suddenness of violent movement ; no dial 
is delicate enough to register the moment when 
day gives place to night. With that amplitude of 
power which accompanies every movement, with 
that sublime quietude of energy which pervades 
every action, Nature calls the day across the hills 


34 


THE MYSTERY OF NIGHT. 


35 


and summons the night that has been waiting at 
the eastern gates. No stir, no strife, no noise of 
great activities, put forth on a vast scale, breaks the 
spell of an hour which is the daily witness of a 
miracle, and waits, hushed and silent, in a world- 
wide worship, while the altar fires blaze on the 
western hills. 

In that unspeakable splendor, earth and air and 
sea are for the moment one, and through them all 
there flashes a divine radiance ; time is not left 
without the witness of its sanctity as it fades off 
the dials of earth and slips like a shining rivulet 
into the shoreless sea of light beyond. The day 
that was born with seas and suns at its cradle is fol- 
lowed to its grave by the long procession of the stars. 
And now that it has gone, with its numberless 
activities, and the heat and stress of their conten- 
tions, how gently and irresistibly Nature summons 
her children back to herself, and touches the brow, 
hot with the fever of work, with the hand of peace ! 
An infinite silence broods over the fields and upon 
the restless bosom of the sea. Insensibly there 
steals into thought, spent and weary with many 
problems, a deep and sweet repose ; the soul does 
not sleep ; it returns to the ancient mother, and at 
her breast feels the old hopes revived, the old 
aspirations quickened, the old faiths relight their 
dying fires. The fever of agonizing struggle yields 
to the calm of infinite trust; the clouds fall apart 
and reveal the vision, that seemed lost, inviolate 


36 


UNDER THE TREES. 


forever; the brief, fierce, fruitless strife for self is 
succeeded by an unquestioning trust in that uni- 
versal good, above and beyond all thought, for 
which the universe stands. Who shall despair 
while the fields of earth are sown with flowers and 
the fields of heaven blossom with stars ? The 
open heart knows, in a revelation which comes to 
it with every dawn and sunset, that life does not 
mock its children when it holds this cup of peace 
to their anguished lips, and that into this tideless 
sea of rest and beauty every breathless and turbu- 
lent streamlet flows at last. 

In the silence of night how real and divine the 
universe becomes ! Doubt and unbelief retreat be- 
fore the awful voices that were silenced by the din 
of the day, but now that the little world of man is 
hushed, seem to have blended all sounds into them- 
selves. Beyond the circle of trees, through which 
a broken vision of stars comes and goes with 
the evening wind, the broad earth lies hushed and 
hidden. Along the familiar road a new and mys- 
terious charm is spread like a net that entangles 
the feet of every traveler and keeps him loitering 
on where he would have passed in unobservant 
haste by day. The great elms murmur in low, in- 
articulate tones, and the shadows at their feet hide 
themselves from the moon, moving noiselessly 
through all the summer night. The woods in the 
distance stand motionless in the wealth of their 
massed foliage, keeping guard over the unbroken 


THE MYSTERY OF NIGHT . 37 

silence that reigns in all their branching aisles. 
Beyond the far-spreading waters lie white and 
dreamlike, and tempt the thought to the fairylands 
that sleep just beyond the line of the horizon. A 
sweet and restful mystery, like a bridal veil, hides 
the face of Nature, and he only can venture to lift it 
who has won the privilege by long and faithful de- 
votion. 

If the night be starlit the shadows are denser, the 
outlook narrower, the mystery deeper ; but what a 
vision overhangs the world and makes the night 
sublime with the poetry of God’s thought visible to 
all eyes ! Who does not feel the passage of divine 
dreams over his troubled life when the infinite 
meadows of heaven are suddenly abloom with light? 
On such a night immortality is written on earth and 
sky; in the silence and darkness there is no hint of 
death ; a sweet and fragrant life seems to breathe 
its subtle, inaudible music through all things. In 
the depths of the woods one feels no loneliness; no 
liquid note of hermit thrush is needed to make 
that silence music. The harmony of universal 
movement, rounded by one thought, carried for- 
ward by one power, guided to one end, is there for 
those who will listen ; the mighty activities which 
feed the century-girded oak from the invisible 
chambers of air and the secret places of the earth 
are so divinely adjusted to their work that one 
shall never detect their toil by any sound of 
struggle or by any sight of effort. Noiselessly, in- 


38 


UNDER THE TREES. 


visibly, the great world breathes new life into every 
part of its being, while the darkness curtains it 
from the fierce ardor of the day. 

In the night the fountains are open and flowing ; 
a marvelous freshness touches leaf and flower and 
grass, and rebuilds their shattered loveliness. The 
stars look down from their inaccessible heights on 
a new creation, and as the procession of the hours 
passes noiselessly on, it leaves behind a dewy fra- 
grance which shall exhale before the rising sun, 
like a universal incense, making the portals of the 
morning sweet with prophecies of the flowers which 
are yet to bloom, and the birds whose song still 
sleeps with the hours it shall set to music. The 
unbroken repose of Nature, born not of idleness 
but of the perfect adjustment of immeasurable 
forces to their task, becomes more real and com- 
prehensible when the darkness hides the infinitude 
of details, and leaves only the great massive 
effects for the eye to rest upon. While men 
sleep, the world sweeps silently onward under 
the watchful stars, in a flight which makes no 
sound and leaves no trace. Through the deep 
shadows the mountains loom in solitary and 
lawful grandeur ; the wide seas send forth and 
recall their mighty tides ; the continents lie 
veiled in rolling mists ; the immeasurable uni- 
verse glitters and burns to the farthest out- 
skirts of space ; and yet, nestled amid this sub- 
lime activity, the little flower dreams of the day. 


THE MYSTERY OF NIGHT. 39 

and in its sleep is ministered to as perfectly as if it 
were the only created thing. 

When one stands on the shores of night and looks 
off on that mighty sea of darkness in which a world 
lies engulfed, there is no thought but worship and 
no speech but silence. Face to face with immensity 
and infinity, one travels in thought among the shin- 
ing islands that rise up out of the fathomless shad- 
ows, and feels everywhere the stir of a life which 
knows no weariness and makes no sound, which 
pervades the darkness no less than the light, and 
makes the night glorious as the day with its garni- 
ture of constellations ; and even as one waits, 
speechless and awestruck, the morning star touches 
the edges of the hills, and a new day breaks re- 
splendent in the eastern sky. 


CHAPTER VIII. 


OFF SHORE. 

Who has not heard, amid the heat and din of 
cities, the voice of the sea striking suddenly into 
the hush of thought its penetrating note of mystery 
and longing ? Then work and the fever which goes 
with it vanished on the instant, and in the crowded 
street or in the narrow room there rose the vision 
of unbroken stretches of sky, free winds, and the 
surge of the unresting waves. That invitation 
never loses its alluring power ; no distance wastes 
its music, and no preoccupation silences its solici- 
tation. It stirs the oldest memories, and awakens 
the most primitive instincts ; the long past speaks 
through it, and through it the buried generations 
•snatch a momentary immortality. History that has 
left no record, rich and varied human experiences 
that have no chronicle, rise out of the forgetfulness 
in which they are engulfed, and are puissant once 
more in the intense and irresistible longing with 
which the heart answers the call of the sea. Once 
more the blood flows with fuller pulse, the eye 
flashes with conscious freedom and power, the 
heart beats to the music of wind and wave, as in 
the days when the fathers of a long past spread sail 


40 


OFF SHORE. 


41 


and sought home, spoil, or change upon the track- 
less waste. Into every past the sea has sometime 
sounded its mighty note of joy or anguish, and 
deep in every memory there remains some vision of 
tossing waves that once broke on eyes long sealed. 

All day the free winds have filled the heavens, 
and flung here and there a handful of foam upon 
the surface of the deep. No cloud has dimmed the 
splendor of a day which has filled the round heavens 
with soft music and touched the sea with strange and 
changeful beauty. It has been enough to wait and 
watch, to forget self, to escape the limitations of 
personality, and to become part of the movement, 
which, hour by hour, has passed through one mar- 
velous change after another, until now it seems to 
pause under the sleepless vigilance of the stars. 
They look down from their immeasurable altitudes 
on the vast expanse of which only a miniature hemi- 
sphere stretches before me. How wide and fath- 
omless seems the ocean, even from a single isolated 
point ! What infinite distances are only half veiled 
by the distant horizon line ! What islands and 
continents and undiscovered worlds lie beyond that 
faint and ever receding circle where the sight 
pauses, while the thought travels unimpeded on its 
pathless way? There lies the untamed world which 
brooks no human control, and preserves the prime- 
val solitude of the epochs before men came ; there 
are the elemental forces mingling and commin- 
gling in eternal fellowships and rivalries. There the 


42 


UNDER THE TREES. 


winds sweep, and the storms marshal their shadows 
as on the first day ; there, too, the sunlight sleeps 
on the summer sea as' it slept in those forgotten 
summers before a sail had ever whitened the blue, 
or a keel cut evanescent furrows in the trackless 
waste. 

Every hour has brought its change to make this 
day memorable ; hour by hour the lights have 
transformed the waters and hung over them a sky 
full of varied and changeful radiance. Across the 
line of the distant horizon white sails have come 
and gone in broken and mysterious procession, and 
the imagination has followed them far in their 
unknown journeyings. As silently as they passed 
from sight, all human history enacted in this vast 
province of nature’s empire has vanished, and left 
no trace of itself save here and there a bit of drift- 
wood. There lies the unconquered and forever 
inviolate kingdom of forces over which no human 
skill will ever cast the net of conquest. 

The sea speaks to the imagination as no other 
aspect of the natural world does, because of its 
vastness, its immeasurable and overwhelming 
power, its exclusion from human history, its free, 
buoyant, changeful being. It stands for those 
strange and unfamiliar revelations with which na- 
ture sometimes breaks in upon our easy relation 
with her, and brings back on the instant that sense 
of remoteness which one feels when in intimate fel- 
lowship a friend suddenly lifts the curtain from 


OFF SHORE. 


43 


some great experience hitherto unsuspected. In 
the vast sweep of life through Nature there must 
always be aspects of awful strangeness ; great 
realms of mystery will remain unexplored, and al- 
most inaccessible to human thought ; days will 
dawn at intervals in which those who love most and 
are nearest Nature will feel an impenetrable cloud 
over all things, and be suddenly smitten with a 
sense of weakness ; the greatest of all her interpre- 
ters are but children in knowledge of her mighty 
activities and forces. On the sea this sense of re- 
moteness and strangeness comes oftener than in 
the presence of any other natural form ; even the 
mountains make sheltered places for our thought at 
their feet, or along their precipitous ledges ; but 
the sea makes no concessions to our human weak- 
ness, and leaves the message which it intones with 
the voice of tempest and the roar of surge without 
an interpreter. Men have come to it in all ages, 
full of a passionate desire to catch its meaning and 
enter into its secret, but the thought of the bold- 
est of them has only skirted its shores, and the vast 
sweep of untamed waters remains as on the first 
day. Ulysses has given us the song of the land- 
locked sea, but where has the ocean found a hu- 
man voice that is not lost and forgotten when it 
speaks to us in its own penetrating tones ? The 
mountains stand revealed in more than one inter- 
pretation, touched by their own sublimity, but the 
sea remains silent in human speech, because no 


44 


UNDER THE TREES. 


voice will ever be strong enough to match its awful 
monody. 

It is because the sea preserves its secret that it 
sways our imagination so royally, and holds us by 
an influence which never loosens its grasp. Again 
and again we return to it, spent and worn, and it 
refills the cup of vitality ; there is life enough and 
to spare in its invisible and inexhaustible chambers 
to reclothe the continents with verdure, and recreate 
the shattered strength of man. Facing its unbroken 
solitudes the limitations of habit and thought be- 
come less obvious ; we escape the monotony of a 
routine, which blurs the senses and makes the spirit 
less sensitive to the universe about it. Life becomes 
free and plastic once more ; a deep consciousness 
of its inexhaustibleness comes over us and recreates 
hope, vigor, and imagination. Under the little 
bridges of habit and theory, which we have made 
for ourselves, how vast and fathomless the sea of 
being is ! What undiscovered forces are there ; 
what unknown secrets of power ; what unsearchable 
possibilities of development and change ! How 
fresh and new becomes that which we thought out- 
worn with use and touched with decay ! How 
boundless and untraveled that which we thought 
explored and sounded to its remotest bound ! 

At night, when the vision of the waters grows in- 
distinct, what voices it has for our solitude ! The 
“ eternal note of sadness,” to which all ages and 
races have listened, and the faint echoes of which 


OFF SHORE. 


45 


are heard in every literature, fills us with a longing 
as vast as the sea and as vague. Infinity and eter- 
nity are not too great for the spirit when the spell 
of the sea is on it, and the voice of the sea fills it 
with uncreated music. 


CHAPTER IX. 


A MOUNTAIN RIVULET. 

This morning the day broke with a promise of 
sultry heat which has been faithfully kept. The 
air was lifeless, the birds silent ; the landscape 
seemed to shrink from the ardor of a gaze that 
penetrated to the very roots of the trees, and cov- 
ered itself with a faint haze. All things stood 
hushed and motionless in a dream of heat ; even 
the harvest fields were deserted. On such a day 
nature herself becomes voiceless ; she seems to re- 
treat into those deep and silent chambers where 
the sources of her life are hidden alike from the 
heat and cold, from darkness and light. A strange 
and foreboding stillness is abroad in the earth, and 
one hides himself from the sun as from an enemy. 

In this unnatural hush there was one voice which 
made the silence less ominous, and revived the 
spent and withered freshness of the spirit. To 
hear that voice seemed to me this morning the one 
consolation which the day offered. It called me 
with cool, delicious tones that seemed almost audi- 
ble, and I braved the deadly heat as the traveler 
urges his way over the desert to the oasis that 
promises a draught of life. As I passed along the 
46 


A MOUNTAIN RIVULET. 


47 


broad aisle of the village street, arched by the 
venerable trees of an older generation, I seemed to 
be in dreamland ; no sound broke the repose of 
midday, no footstep echoed far or near ; the cattle 
stood motionless in the fields beneath the shelter- 
ing branches. I turned into the dusty country 
road, and saw the vision of the great encircling 
hills, remote, shadowless, and dreamlike, against 
the white August sky. I sauntered slowly on, 
pausing here and there at the foot of some sturdy 
oak or wide-branched apple, until I reached the 
little stream that comes rippling down from the 
mountain glen. A short walk across the fields 
under the burning sun brought me into the shadow 
of the trees that skirt the borders of the woodland. 
The brook loitered between its green and sloping 
banks and broke in tiny billows over the smooth 
stones that lay in its bed ; the shadows grew denser 
as I advanced, and a delicious coolness from the 
depths of the woods touched the sultry atmosphere. 
A moment later, and I stood within the glen. The 
world of human activity had vanished, shut out of 
sight and sound by the deepening foliage of the 
trees behind me. Overhead hardly a leaf stirred, 
but the branching boughs spread a marvelous roof 
between the heavens and the woodland paths, and 
suffered only a stray flash of light here and there 
to strike through. As I advanced slowly along the 
well-worn path beside the brook, the glen grew 
more and more narrow, the hillsides more and 


4 8 


UNDER THE TREES. 


more precipitous. In the dusky light that sifted 
down through the great trees I felt the delicious re- 
lief of low tones after the glare of the summer day. 
It was another world into which I had come ; a 
world of unbroken repose and silence, a world of 
sweet and fragrant airs cooled by the mountain 
rivulet and shielded by the mountain summits and 
the arching umbrage. 

The path vanished at last and nothing remained 
but the narrow channel of the brook itself, the 
smooth stones making a precarious and uncertain 
footing for the adventurous explorer. How sooth- 
ing was the ceaseless plash of that little stream, 
fretting its moss-grown banks and dashing in minia- 
ture surge against the stones in its path ! What 
infinite peace reigned in this place, around which 
the brotherhood of mountains had gathered, to hold 
it inviolate against all coiners ! The great rocks 
were moss-covered, the steep slopes on either side 
were faintly flecked with light, and one saw here 
and there, through the clustered trunks of trees, a 
gleam of blue sky. Sometimes the brook narrowed 
to a tiny stream, rushing with impetuous current 
between the rocky walls that formed its channel ; 
then it spread out shallow and noisy over some 
broader expanse of white sand and polished pebble ; 
then it loitered in the shadow of a great rock and 
became a deep, silent pool, full of shadows and the 
mysteries whiph lurk in such remote and dusky 
places. 


A MOUNTAIN RIVULET. 


49 


It was beside such a pool that I paused at last, 
and seated myself with infinite content. Before 
me the glen narrowed into a rocky chasm, over 
which the adventurous trees that clung to the pre- 
cipitous hillsides spread a dense roof of foliage. 
The dark pool at my feet was full of mysterious 
shadows and seemed to cover epochs of buried 
history. As I studied its motionless surface the 
old medieval legends of black, fathomless pools 
came back tome, and I felt the air of enchantment 
stealing over me, lulling my latter-day skepticism 
into sleep, and making all mysteries rational and 
all marvels probable. In these silent depths no 
magical art had ever submerged cities or castles ; 
on the stillest of all quiet afternoons no muffled 
echoes, faint and far, float up through the waveless 
waters. But who knows what shadows have sunk 
into these sunless depths ; what reflections of 
waving branches, what siftings of subdued light, 
what hushed echoes of the forgotten summers that 
perished here ages ago ? 

In such a place, at such an hour, one feels the 
most subtle and the most searching spell which Na- 
ture ever throws over those that seek her ; a spell 
woven of many charms, magical potions, and pow- 
erful incantations. The quiet of the place, awful 
with the unbroken silence of centuries ; the soft, 
half light, which conceals more than it discloses ; 
the retreating trunks of trees interlacing their 
branches against invasion from light or heat or 


5 ° 


UNDER THE TREES. 


sound ; the steep ravine, receding in darker and 
darker distance, until it seems like one of the fabled 
passages to the under world : the wide, shadowy 
pool, into which no sunlight falls, and in which night 
itself seems to sleep under the very eyes of day — all 
these things speak a language which even the dullest 
must understand. As I sit musing, conscious of 
the darkest shadows and deepest mysteries close at 
hand, and yet undisturbed by them, I recall that 
one of the noblest poems on Death ever written 
was inspired in this place ; and I note without sur- 
prise, as its solemn lines come back to me, that 
there is no horror in it, no ignoble fear, but awe 
and reverence and the sublimity of a great and 
hopeful thought. The organ music of those slow- 
moving verses seems like the very voice of a place 
out of which all dread has gone from the thought 
of death, and where the brief span of life seems to 
arch the abyss of death with immortality. 


CHAPTER X. 


THE EARLIEST INSIGHTS. 

The heaven which lies about us in our infancy, 
like every other heaven of which men have dreamed, 
lies mainly within us ; it is the heaven of fresh in- 
stincts, of unworn receptivity, of expanding intelli- 
gence. It is a heaven of faith and wonder, as 
every heaven must be ; it is a heaven of recurring 
miracle, of renewing freshness, of deepening in- 
terest. Into such a heaven every child is born who 
brings into life that leaven of the imagination which 
later on is to penetrate the universe and make it 
one in the sublime order of truth and of beauty. 

As I write, the merry shouts of children come 
through the open window, and seem part of that 
universal sound in which the stir of leaves, the 
faint, far song of birds, and the note of insect life 
are blended. When I came across the field a few 
moments ago, a voice called me from under the 
apple trees, and a little figure, with a flush of joy on 
her face and the fadeless light of love in her eyes, 
came running with uneven pace to meet me. How 
slight and frail was that vision of childhood to the 
thought which saw the awful forces of nature at 
work, or rather at play, about her ! And yet how 


51 


5 2 


UNDER THE TREES. 


serene was her look upon the great world dropping 
its fruit at her feet ; how familiar and at ease her 
attitude in the presence of these sublime mysteries ! 
She is at one with the hour and the scene ; she has 
not begun to think of herself as apart from the 
things which surround her ; that strange and sud- 
den sense of unreality which makes me at times an 
alien and a stranger in the presence of Nature, 
“ moving about in world not realized,” is still far 
off. For her the sun shines and the winds blow, 
the bowers bloom and the stars glisten, the trees 
hold out their protecting arms and the grass 
weaves its soft garment, and she accepts them 
without a thought of what is behind them or shall 
follow them ; the painful process of thought, which 
is first to separate her from Nature and then to re- 
unite her to it in a higher and more spiritual fel- 
lowship, has hardly begun. She still walks in the 
soft light of faith, and drinks in the immortal 
beauty, as the flower at her side drinks in the dew 
and the light. It is she, after all, who is right as 
she plays, joyously and at home, on the ground 
which the earthquake may rock, and under the sky 
which storms will darken and rend. The far- 
brought instinct of childhood accepts without a 
question that great truth of unity and fellowship to 
which knowledge comes only after long and ago- 
nizing quest. Between the innocent sleep of child- 
hood in the arms of Nature and the calm repose of 
the old man in the same enfolding strength there 


THE EARLIEST INSIGHTS. 


53 


stretches the long, sleepless day of question, search, 
and suffering ; at the end the wisest returns to the 
goal from which he set out. 

To the little child, Nature is a succession of new 
and wonderful impressions. Coming he knows not 
whence, he opens his eyes upon a world which is 
as new to him as is the virgin continent to the first 
discoverer. It matters not that countless eyes have 
already opened and closed on the same magical 
appearances, that numberless feet have trodden 
the same paths ; for him the morning star still 
shines on the first day, and the dew of the primeval 
night is still on the flowers. Day by day light and 
shadow fall in unbroken succession on the sensitive 
surface of his mind, and gradually an elementary 
order discovers itself in the regularity of these re- 
curring impressions. Form, color, distance, size, 
relativity of position are felt rather than seen, and 
the dim and confused mass of sensations discovers 
something trustworthy and stable behind. Nature 
is now simple appearance ; thought has not begun 
to inquire where the lantern is hidden which throws 
this wonderful picture on the clouds, nor who it is 
that shifts the scenes. Day and night alternately 
spread out a changeful successions of wonders 
simply that the young eyes may look upon them ; 
and grass is green and sky blue that young feet 
may find soft resting-places and the young head 
a beautiful roof over it. Every day is a new 
discovery, and every night receives into its dreams 


54 


UNDER THE TREES. 


some new object from the world of sights and 
sounds. 

Nature surrounds her child with invisible teach- 
ers, and makes even its play a training for the 
highest duties. Gradually, imperceptibly, she ex- 
pands the vision and suffers here and there a hint 
of something deeper and more wonderful to stir 
and direct the young discoverer. He sees the 
apple tree let fall its blossoms, and, lo ! the fruit 
grows day by day to a mellow and enticing ripeness 
under his eyes. Suddenly he detects a hidden 
sequence between flower and fruit ! The rose bush 
is covered with buds, small, green, unsightly ; a 
night passes, and, behold ! great clusters of blos- 
soming flowers that call him by their fragrance, 
and when he has come reward him with a miracle 
of color. Here is another mystery ; and day by 
day they multiply and grow yet more wonderful. 
These varied and marvelous appearances are no 
longer detached and changeless to him ; they are 
alive, and they change moment by moment. Ah, 
the young feet have come now to the very thresh- 
old of the temple, and fortunate are they if there 
be one to guide them whose heart still speaks the 
language of childhood while her thought rests in 
the great truths which come with deep and earnest 
living. Childhood is defrauded of half its inherit- 
ance when no one swings wide before it the door 
into the fairyland of Nature ; a land in which the 
most beautiful dreams are like visions of the dis- 


THE EARLIEST INSIGHTS. 


55 


tant Alps, cloudlike, apparently evanescent, yet 
eternally true ; in which the commonest realities 
are more wonderful than visions. How many 
children live all their childhood in the very heart 
of this realm, and are never so much as told to 
look about them. The sublime miracle play is 
yearly performed in their sight, and they only 
hear it said that it is hot or cold, that the day is 
fair or dark ! 

And now there come sudden insights into still 
larger and more awful truths ; a sense of wonder 
and awe makes the night solemn with mystery. 
Who does not recall some starlit night which sud- 
denly, alone on a country road, perhaps, seemed to 
flash its splendor into his very soul and lift all life 
for a moment to a sublime height ? The trees stood 
silent down the long road, no other footstep echoed 
far or near, one was alone with Nature and at one 
with her ; suspecting no strange nearness of her 
presence, no sudden revelation of her inner self, 
and yet in the very mood in which these were both 
possible and natural. The boy of Wordsworth’s 
imagination would stand beneath the trees “ when 
the earliest stars began to move along the edges of 
the hills,” and, with fingers interwoven, blow mimic 
bootings to the owls : 

And they would shout 
Across the watery vale, and shout again, 

Responsive to his call — with quivering peals, 

And long halloos, and screams, and echoes loud, 


56 


UNDER THE TREES. 


Redoubled and redoubled ; concourse wild 
Of mirth and jocund din. And when it chanced 
That pauses of deep silence mock’d his skill, 

Then, sometimes, in that silence, while he hung 
Listening, a gentle shock of mild surprise 
Has carried far into his heart the voice 
Of mountain torrents ; or the visible scene 
Would enter unawares into his mind 
With all its solemn imagery, its rocks, 

Its woods, and that uncertain heaven, received 
Into the bosom of the steady lake. 

It is iii such moods as this, when all things are 
forgotten, and heart and mind are open to every 
sight and sound, that Nature comes to the soul 
with some deep, sweet message of her inner being, 
and with invisible hand lifts the curtain of mystery 
for one hushed and fleeting moment. 

As I write, the memory of a summer afternoon 
long ago comes back to me. The old orchard 
sleeps in the dreamy air, the birds are silent, a tran- 
quil spirit broods over the whole earth. Under the 
wide-spreading branches a boy is intently reading. 
He has fallen upon a bit of transcendental writing 
in a magazine, and for the first time has learned 
that to some men the great silent world about him, 
that seems so real and changeless, is immaterial 
and unsubstantial — a vision projected by the soul 
upon illimitable space. On the instant all things 
are smitten with unreality ; the solid earth sinks 
beneath him, and leaves him solitary and awestruck 
in a universe that is a dream. He cannot under- 


THE EARLIEST INSIGHTS. 


57 


stand, but he feels what Emerson meant when he 
said, “ The Supreme Being does not build up Na- 
ture around us, but puts it forth through us, as the 
life of the tree puts forth new branches and leaves.” 
That which was fixed, stable, cast in permanent 
forms forever, was suddenly annihilated by a reve- 
lation which spoke to the heart rather than the 
intellect, and laid bare at a glance the unseen spiri- 
tual foundations upon which all things rest at last. 
From that moment the boy saw with other eyes, and 
lived henceforth in things not made with hands. 

If we could but revive the consciousness of 
childhood, if we could but look out once more 
through its unclouded eyes, what divinity would 
sow the universe with light and make it radiant 
with fadeless visions of beauty and of truth ! 


CHAPTER XI. 


THE HEART OF THE WOODS. 

There are certain moods in which my feet turn, 
as by instinct, to the woods. I set out upon the 
winding road with a zest of anticipation whose edge 
no repetition of the after-experience ever dulls ; I 
loiter at the shaded turn, watched often by the 
bright, quick eye of the squirrel peering over the 
old stone wall, and sometimes uttering a chattering 
protest against my invasion of his hereditary pri- 
vacy. Here and there along the way of my familiar 
pilgrimage a great tree stands at the roadside and 
spreads its far-reaching shadow over the traveler ; 
and these are the places where I always throw my- 
self on the ground and wait for the spirit of the 
hour and the scene to take possession of me. One 
needs preparation for the sanctities and solemni- 
ties of the woods, and in the slow progress which I 
always make hitherward the world slips away with 
the village that sinks behind the hill at the first 
turn and reminds me no longer by sight or sound 
that life is fretting its channels there and every- 
where with its world-old pathos and onward move- 
ment, caught on the sudden by unseen currents and 
swept into wild eddies, or flung over a precipice in 
58 


THE HEART OF THE WOODS. 


59 


a mist of tears. As I go on I feel a return of 
emotions which I am sure have their root in my 
earliest ancestry, a freshening of sense which tells 
me that I am nearing again those scenes which the 
unworn perceptions of primitive men first fronted. 
The conscious, self-directed intellectual movement 
within me seems somehow to cease, and something 
deeper, older, fuller of mystery, takes its place ; the 
instincts assert themselves, and I am dimly con- 
scious of an elder world through which I once 
walked — and yet not I, but some one whose mem- 
ory lies back of my memory, as the farthest, faint- 
est hills fade into infinity on the boundaries of the 
world. I am ready for the woods now, for I am 
escaping the limitations of my own personality, 
with its narrow experience and its short memory, 
and I am entering into consciousness of a race life 
and dimly surveying the records of a race memory. 

At last the road turns abruptly from the hillside 
to which it clings with the loyalty of ancient asso- 
ciation, and, running straight across a low-lying 
meadow, enters a deep wood, and vanishes from 
sight for many a mile. It is with a deep sigh of 
content that I find myself once more in that dim 
wonderland whose mysteries I would not fathom if 
I could'. I am at one with the genius of the place; 
I have escaped customs, habits, conventions of 
every sort ; the false growths of civilization have 
fallen away and left me in primitive strength and 
freshness once more ; my own personality disap- 


6o 


UNDER THE TREES . 


pears, and I am breathing the universal life ; I 
have gone back to the far beginning of things, and 
I am once more in that dim, rich moment of prime- 
val contact with Nature out of which all mytholo- 
gies and literatures have grown. How profound 
and all-embracing is the silence, and yet how full of 
inarticulate sound ! The faint whisperings of the 
leaves touch me first with a sense of melody, and 
then, later, with a sense of mystery. These are the 
most venerable voices to which men have ever lis- 
tened ; and when I think of the immeasurable life 
that seems to be groping for utterance in them, I 
remember with no consciousness of skepticism 
that these are the voices which men once waited 
upon as oracles ; nay, rather, wait upon still ; for am 
I not now listening for the word which shall speak 
to me out of these shadowy depths and this mys- 
terious antique life ? I am ready to listen and to 
follow if only these vagrant sounds shall blend into 
one clear note and declare to me that secret which 
they have kept so well through the centuries. I 
wait expectant, as I have waited so often before ; 
there is unbroken stillness, then a faint murmur 
slowly rising and spreading until I am sure that the 
moment of revelation has come, then a slow reces- 
sion back to silence. I am not discouraged ; sooner 
or later that multitudinous rustle of the wild woods 
will break into clear-voiced speech. I am sure, too, 
that some great movement of life is about to dis- 
play itself before me. Is not this hush the sudden 


THE HEART OF THE WOODS. 6 1 

stillness of those whom I have surprised and who 
have, on the instant, sprung to their coverts and 
are waiting impatiently until I have gone, to re- 
sume their interrupted frolic ! I have often 
watched and waited here before in vain, but surely 
to-day I shall beguile these hidden folk into revela- 
tion of that wonderful life they have suddenly 
suspended ! So I throw myself at the foot of a 
great pine, and wait ; the minutes move slowly 
across the unseen dial of the day, and I have be- 
come so still and motionless that I am part of this 
secluded world. The sun shines abroad, but I have 
forgotten it; there are clouds passing all day in their 
aerial journeyings, but they cast no shadow over 
me ; even the flight of the hours is unnoticed. 
Eternity might come and I should be no wiser, I 
should see no change ; for does it not already hold 
these vast dim aisles and solitudes within its 
peaceful empire ? And is there not here the slow 
procession of birth, decay, and death, in that sub- 
lime order of growth which we call immortality ? 

I wait and watch, and I can wait forever if need 
be. Suddenly from the depths of the forest there 
comes a note of penetrating sweetness, wild, magi- 
cal, ethereal ; I slowly raise myself and wait. 
Surely this is the signal, and in a moment I shall 
see the dim spaces between the trees peopled and 
animate. There is a moment’s pause, and then 
again that strange, mysterious song rings through 
the listening forest. It touches me like a sudden 


62 


UNDER THE TREES. 


revelation ; I forget that for which I have waited ; 
I only know that the woods have found their voice, 
and that I have fallen upon the sacred hour when 
the song is a prayer. Who shall describe that wild, 
strange music of the hermit-thrush ? Who will 
ever hear it in the depths of the forest without a 
sudden thrill of joy and a sudden sense of pathos ? 
It is a note apart from the symphony to which the 
summer has moved across the fields and homes of 
men ; it has no kinship with those flooding, liquid 
melodies which poured from feathered throats 
through the long golden days ; there is a strain in 
it that was never caught under blue skies and in 
the safe nesting of the familiar fields ; it is the 
voice of solitude suddenly breaking into sound ; it 
is the speech of that other world so near our doors, 
and yet removed from us by uncounted centuries 
and unexplored experiences. 

The spell of silence has been broken, and I ven- 
ture softly toward the hidden fountain from which 
this unworldly song has flowed ; but I am too slow 
and too late, and it remains to me a disembodied 
voice singing the “old, familiar things ” of a past 
which becomes more and more distinct as I linger 
in the shadows of this ancient place. As I walk 
slowly on, there grows upon me the sense of a life 
which for the most part makes no sound, and is all 
the deeper and richer because it is inarticulate. 
The very thought of speech or companionship jars 
upon me ; silence alone is possible for such hours 


THE HEART OF THE WOODS. 


6 3 


and moods. The great movement of life which 
builds these mighty trunks and sends the vital cur- 
rents to their highest branches, which alternately 
clothes and denudes them, makes no sound ; cycle 
after cycle have the completed centuries made, and 
yet no sign of waning power here, no evidence of a 
finished work ! Here life first dawned upon men ; 
here, slowly, it discovered its meaning to them ; 
here the first impressions fell upon senses keen 
with desire for untried sensations ; here the first 
great thoughts, vast as the forest and as shadowy, 
moved slowly on toward conscious clearness in 
minds that were just beginning to think ; here and 
not elsewhere are the roots of those earliest con- 
ceptions of Nature and Life, which again and again 
have come to such glorious blossoming in the liter- 
atures of the race. This is, in a word, the world of 
primal instinct and impression ; and, therefore, for- 
ever the deepest, most familiar, and yet most mar- 
velous world to which men may come in all their 
wanderings. 

As these thoughts come and go, unclothed with 
words and unsought by will, I grasp again the deep 
truth that the truest life is unconscious and almost 
voiceless ; that there is no rich, true, articulate life 
unless there flows under it a wide, deep current of 
unspoken, almost unconscious, thought and feeling; 
that the best one ever says or does is as a few 
drops flung into the sunlight from a swift, hidden 
stream, and shining for a moment as they fall 


6 4 


UNDER THE TREES . 


again into a current inaudible and invisible. The 
intellectual life that is all expressed, that is all con- 
scious and self-directed, is but a shallow life at 
best ; he only lives deeply in the intellect whose 
thought begins in instinct, rises slowly through ex- 
perience, carrying with it into consciousness the 
noblest, truest one has felt and been, and finds 
speech at last by impulse and direction of the same 
law which summons the seed from the soil and lifts 
it, growth by growth, to the beauty and the sweet- 
ness of the flower. Under the same law of uncon- 
scious growth every true poem, every great work 
of art, and every genuine noble character, has fash- 
ioned itself and come at last to conscious perfect- 
ness and recognition. Genius is nearer Nature 
than talent ; it is only when it strays away from 
Nature, and loses itself in mere dexterities, that it 
degenerates into skill and becomes a tool with 
which to work, and not a gift from heaven. The 
silence of the deep woods is pregnant with mighty 
growths. Says Maurice de Guerin, true poet and 
lover of Nature : “ An innumerable generation 

actually hangs on the branches of all the trees, on 
the fibers of the most insignificant grasses, like 
babes on the mother’s breast. All these germs, in- 
calculable in their number and variety, are there 
suspended in their cradle between heaven and 
earth, and given over to the winds, whose 
charge it is to rock these beings. Unseen amid 
the living forests swing the forests of the future. 


THE HEART OF THE WOODS. 65 

Nature is all absorbed in the vast cares of her 
maternity.” 

But while I walk and meditate, letting the forest 
tell its story to my innermost thought, and recalling 
here only that which is most obvious and superficial 
(who is sufficient for the deeper things that lie like 
pearls in the depths of his being ?), the light grows 
dimmer, and I know that the day has gone. I re- 
trace my steps until through the clustered trunks 
of the trees I see once more the green meadows 
soft in the light of sunset. As I pass over the 
boundary line of the forest once more, faint and far 
the song of the thrush searches the wood, and, 
finding me, leaves its ethereal note in my memory — 
a note wild as the forest, and thrilling into momen- 
tary consciousness I know not what forgotten ages 
of awe and wonder and worship. 


CHAPTER XII. 


BESIDE THE RIVER. 

All day long the river has moved through my 
thought as it rolls through the landscape spread 
out at my feet. There it lies, winding for many a 
mile within the boundaries of this noble outlook ; 
by day flecked with sails approaching and receding, 
and at night shining under the full moon like a 
girdle of silver, clasping mountains and broad 
meadow lands in a varied but harmonious land- 
scape. From the point at which I look out upon 
its long course, the stream has a setting worthy of 
its volume and its history. In the distant back- 
ground a mountain range, of noble altitude and 
outline, has to-day an ethereal strength and splen- 
dor ; a slight haze has obliterated all details, and 
left the great hills soft and dreamlike in the Sep- 
tember sunshine ; at first sight one waits to see 
them vanish, but they remain, wrought upon by sun- 
light and atmosphere, until the twilight touches 
them with purple and night turns them into mighty 
shadows. On either hand, in the middle ground of 
the picture, long lines of hills shut the river within 
a world of its own, and shelter the green meadows, 
the fallow fields, and the stretches of woodland 
66 


BESIDE THE RIVER. 


67 


that cover the broad sweep from the river’s edge to 
their own bases. Below me the quiet current enters 
the heart of another group of mountains, flowing 
silently between the precipitous and rocky heights 
that lift themselves on either hand, indifferent 
alike to the frowning summits when the sun warms 
them with smiles, and to the black and portentous 
shadows which they often cast across the channel 
at their feet. The solitude and awe which belong 
to mountain passes through which great rivers flow 
clothe this place with solemnity and majesty as with 
a visible garment, and fill one with a sense of inde- 
scribable awe. 

The river which lies before me moves through a 
mist of legend and tradition as well as through a 
landscape of substantial history. It has been called 
an epical river because of the varied and sustained 
beauty through which it sweeps from its mountain 
sources to the sea ; but as I turn from it, and the 
visible loveliness of its banks fades from sight, I 
recall that other landscape of history and legend 
through which it rolls, and that, for the moment, is 
the reality, and the other the shadow. A web of 
human associations spreads itself over this long 
valley like a richer atmosphere ; the fields are ripe 
with action and achievement ; every projecting 
point has its story, every gentle curve and quiet 
inlet its memory ; for many and many a decade of 
years life has touched this silent stream and human- 
ized its power and beauty until it has become part 


68 


UNDER THE TREES. 


of the vast human experience wrought out between 
these mountain boundaries. As I think of these 
things and of the world of dear past things which 
they recall, another great river sweeps into the 
vision of memory, but how different ! There comes 
with it no warmth of human emotion, but only the 
breath of the unbroken woods, the awful aspect of 
the great, precipitous cliffs, the vast solitude out of 
which it rolls, with troubled current, to mingle its 
mysterious waters with the northern gulf. It is a 
stream which Nature still keeps for herself, and 
suffers no division of ownership with men; a stream 
as wild and solitary as the remote and unpeopled 
land through which it moves. This river, on the 
other hand, bears every hour the wealth of a great 
inland commerce upon its wide current ; it flows 
past cities and villages scattered thickly along its 
course, past countless homes whose lights weave a 
shining net along its banks at night; on still Sab- 
bath mornings the bells answer each other in almost 
unbroken peal along its course. Emerging from 
an unknown past in the earliest days of discovery, 
human interests have steadily multiplied along its 
shores, and spread over it the countless lines of 
human activity. To-day the Argo, multiplied a 
thousand times, seeks the golden fleece of com- 
merce at every point along its shores ; and of the 
countless Jasons who make the voyage few return 
empty-handed. Hour after hour the white sails fly 
in mysterious and changing lines, messengers of 


BESIDE THE El FEE. 


69 


wealth and trade and pleasure, whose voyages are 
no sooner ended than they begin again. It is this 
wealth of action and achievement which make the 
names of great rivers sonorous as the voices of the 
centuries ; the Nile, the Danube, the Rhine, the 
Hudson — how weighty are these words with asso- 
ciations old as history and deep as the human 
heart ! 

The rivers are the great channels through which 
the ceaseless interchange of the elements goes on ; 
they unite the heart of the continents and the soli- 
tary places of the mountains with the universal sea 
which washes all shores and beats its melancholy 
refrain at either pole. Into their currents the hills 
and uplands pour their streams ; to them the little 
rivulets come laughing and singing down from 
their sources in the forest depths. A drop falling 
from a passing shower into the lake of Delolo may 
be carried eastward, through the Zambesi, to the 
Indian Ocean, or west^Pfd, along the transcon- 
tinental course of the Congo, to the Atlantic. The 
mists that rise from great streams, separated by 
vast stretches of territory, commingle in the upper 
air, and are carried by vagrant winds to the wheat- 
fields of the far Northwest or the rice-fields of the 
South. The ocean ceaselessly makes the circuit of 
the globe, and summons its tributaries along all 
shores to itself. But it gives even more lavishly than 
it receives; day and night there rise over its vast ex- 
panse those invisible clouds of moisture which dif- 


70 


UNDER THE TREES. 


fuse themselves through the atmosphere, and de- 
scend at last upon the earth to pour, sooner or later, 
into the rivers, and be returned whence they came. 
This subtle commerce, universal throughout the 
whole domain of nature, animate and inanimate, tells 
us a common truth with the rose, and corrects the 
false report of the senses that all things are fixed and 
isolated. It discloses a communion of matter with 
matter, a fellowship of continent with continent, an 
interchange of forces which throws a broad light on 
things still deeper and more marvelous. It affirms 
the unity of all created things and predicts the dawn 
of a new thought of the kinship of races; there is in 
it the prophecy of new insights into the universal 
life of men, of fellowships that shall rise to the re- 
cognition of new duties, and of a well-being which 
shall bind the weakest to the strongest, the poorest 
to the richest, the lowest to the highest, by the 
golden bond of a diviner love. 


CHAPTER XIII. 


AT THE SPRING. 

The path across the fields is so well worn that 
one can find his way along its devious course by 
night almost as easily as by day. I have gone over 
it at all hours, and have never returned without 
some fresh and cheering memory for other and less 
favored days. The fields across which it leads 
one, with the unfailing suggestion of something 
better beyond, are undulating and dotted here and 
there with browsing cattle. The landscape is full 
of pastoral repose and charm — the charm of familiar 
things that are touched with old memories, and 
upon whose natural beauty there rests the reflected 
light of days that have become idyllic. No one 
can walk along a country road, over which as a boy 
he heard the daily invitation of the schoolhouse 
bell without discovering at every turn some love- 
liness never revealed save to the glance of unfor- 
gotten youth. The path which leads to the spring 
has this unfailing charm for me, and for many who 
have long ceased to follow its winding course. At 
this season it is touched here and there by the 
autumnal splendor, and fairly riots in the profusion 
of the golden-rod, whose yellow plumes are lighting 
7i 


7 2 


UNDER THE TREES. 


the retreating steps of summer across the fields. 
Great masses of brilliant woodbine cover the stone 
walls and hang from the trees along the fences. 
The corn, cut and stacked in orderly lines, is not 
without its transforming touch of color ; and while 
the trees still wait for the coronation of the year 
Nature seems to have passed along this path and 
turned it into a royal highway. As it approaches 
the woods, one gets glimpses of the village spires in 
the distance, and find a new charm in this border- 
land between sunlight and shadow, between solitude 
and the companionship of human life. A little dis- 
tance along the edges of the woods, with an oc- 
casional detour of the path into the shades of the 
forest, brings one to the spring. A great, rudely- 
cut stone marks the place, and makes a kind of 
background for the cool, limpid pool into which a 
few leaves fall from the woods, but which belongs 
to the open sky and fields. There is certainly no 
more gentle, reposeful scene than this ; so secluded 
from the dust and whirl of cities and thoroughfares, 
and yet so near to ancient homes, so sweet and life- 
giving in its service to them, so often and so 
eagerly sought at all seasons and by men of all 
conditions. Here oftenest come the restless feet 
of children, and their shouts are almost the only 
sounds that ever break this solitude. 

To me there is something inexpressibly sweet 
and refreshing in the familiar and yet unfailing 
loveliness of this place. The fields are always 


AT THE SPRING . 


73 


peaceful, and the slow motions of the cattle grouped 
here and there under the shadows of solitary trees, 
or of the sheep browsing in long, irregular lines 
across the further meadows, give the landscape 
that touch of pastoral life which unites us with 
Nature in the oldest and most homelike relations. 
Here, on still summer afternoons, one seems to 
have come upon a sleeping world ; a world over 
whose slumber the clouds are passing like peace- 
ful dreams. In such an hour the limpid water of 
the spring seems to rise out of the very heart of 
the earth, and to bring with it an unfailing refresh- 
ment of spirit. The white sand through which it 
finds its way makes its transparent clearness more 
apparent, and the great stone seems to hold back 
the woods from an approach that would overshadow 
it. It rises so silently into the visible world from 
the unseen depths that one cannot but feel some 
illusion of sentiment thrown over it, some dis- 
closure of truth escaping with it from the darkness 
beneath. Whence does it flow, and what has its 
journey been ? Did some remote mountain range 
gather its waters from the clouds and send them 
down through long and winding channels deep in 
its heart? Is there far below an invisible stream 
flowing, like the river Alphaeus, unseen and un- 
heard beneath the earth ? The spring is mute 
when these questions rise to lips which it is always 
ready to moisten from its cool depths. It is 


74 


UNDER THE TREES. 


enough that in this quiet place the bounty of 
Nature never ceases to overflow, and that here she 
holds out the cup of refreshment with royal indif- 
ference to gratitude or neglect. Here she ministers 
to every comer as if her whole life were a service. 
One forgets that behind this cup of cold water, held 
out to the humblest, there sweep sublime powers, 
and that the same hand which serves him here 
moves in their courses the planets, whose faint re- 
flections shine in this silent pool by night. 

Springs have been natural centers of life from the 
earliest times. Deep in the solitude of forests, or 
fringed with foliage in the heart of deserts, they 
have alike served the needs and appealed to the 
sentiment of men. Around the wells cluster the 
most venerable associations of the ancient patri- 
archal families ; the beautiful pastoral life of the 
Old Testament, full of deep, unwritten poetry, dis- 
covers no scenes more characteristic and touching 
than those which were enacted beside these sources 
of fertility. Green and fruitful in the memory of 
the most sacred history repose these cool, refresh- 
ing pools under the burning glance of the tropical 
sun. Here, too, as in those distant lands, life is 
kept in constant freshness around the borders of 
the spring. The grass grows green and dense here 
the whole summer through, and here there is always 
a breath of cooler air when the fields glow with in- 
tense heat. In such places Nature waits to touch 


AT THE SPRING . 


75 


the fevered spirit with something of her own peace, 
and to keep alive forever in the hearts of men that 
faith in things unseen which rises like a spring 
from the depths, and makes a center of fruitful and 
beautiful life. 


CHAPTER XIV. 


ON THE HEIGHTS. 

Nature creates days for special insights and 
outlooks — days whose distinctive qualities make 
them part of the universal revelation of the year. 
There are days for the deep woods, and for the 
open fields ; days for the beach, and for the inland 
river ; days for solitary musing beside some se- 
cluded rivulet, and days for the companionship 
and movement of the highways. Each day is 
fitted by some subtle magic of adaptation to the 
place and the aspect of nature which it is to reveal 
with a clearness denied to other hours. There 
came such a day not long ago to me ; a day of 
tonic atmosphere — clear, cloudless, inspiring ; there 
was no audible invitation in the air, but I knew by 
some instinct that the day and the mountains were 
parts of one complete whole. The morning itself 
was a new birth of nature, full of promise and 
prophecy ; one of those hours in which only the 
greatest and noblest things are credible, in which 
one rejects unfaith and doubt and all lesser and 
meaner things as dreams of a night from which 
there has come an eternal awakening ; a day such 
as Emerson had in thought when he wrote : “ The 
76 


ON THE HEIGHTS. 


77 


scholar must look long for the right hour for Plato’s 
Timseus. At last the elect morning arrives, the 
early dawn — a few lights conspicuous in the heaven, 
as of a world just created and still becoming — and 
in its wide leisure we dare open that book. There 
are days when the great are near us, when there is 
no frown on their brow, no condescension even ; 
when they take us by the hand, and we share their 
thought.” When such a morning dawns, one de- 
mands, by right of his own nature, the pilotage of 
great thoughts to some height whence the whole 
world will lie before him ; one knows by unclouded 
insight that life is greater than all his dreams, and 
that he is heir, not only of the centuries, but of 
eternity. 

Such days belong to the mountains ; and when I 
opened my window on this morning, I was in no 
doubt as to the invitation held forth by earth and 
sky. There was exhilaration in the very thought 
of the long climb, and at an early hour I was fast 
leaving the village behind me. The road skirted 
the base of the mountain, and struck at once into the 
heart of the wilderness, which the clustering peaks 
have preserved from any but the most fleeting asso- 
ciations with the peopled world around. A barrier 
of ancient silence and solitude soon separated me 
even in thought from the familiar scenes I had left. 
A virginal beauty rested upon the road, and sank 
deep into my own heart as I passed along ; to be 
silent and open-minded was enough to bring one into 


78 


UNDER THE TREES. 


fellowship with the hour and the scene. The clear, 
bracing air, the rustling of leaves slowly sifting 
down through the lower branches, the solemn 
quietude, filled the morning with a deep joy that 
touched the very sources of life, and made them 
sweet in every thought and emotion. It was like a 
new beginning in the old, old story of time ; the 
stains of ancient wrong, the blights of sorrow, the 
wrecks of hope, were gone ; sweet with the untrod- 
den freshness of a new day lay the earth, and 
looked up to the heavens with a gaze as pure and 
calm as their own. Somehow all life seemed sub- 
limated in that golden sunshine ; the grosser 
elements had vanished, the material had become 
the transparent medium of the spiritual, the dis- 
cords had blended into harmony, and one would 
have heard without surprise the faint, far song of 
the stars. The whole world was one vast articulate 
poem, and human life added its own strain of pene- 
trating sweetness. At last, after all these years of 
struggle and failure, one was really living ! 

The road, slowly ascending the long wooded 
slope, wound its way through the forest until it 
brought me to the mountain path which climbs, 
with many a halt and pause, to the very summit. 
Dense foliage overshadows it, a little thinner now 
that the hand of autumn has begun to disrobe the 
trees. Great rocks often lie in the course of the 
path and send it in a narrow curve around them. 
Sometimes one comes upon a bold ascent up the 


ON THE HEIGHTS . 


79 


face of a projecting cliff ; sometimes one plunges 
into the very heart of the shadows as they gather 
over the rocky channel of the brook that later will 
run foaming down to the valley. Step by step one 
widens his horizon, although it is only at intervals 
that he is able to note his progress upward. At 
the base of the mountain one saw only a circle of 
hills, and the long sweep of wooded slopes which 
converge in the valley ; gradually the horizon 
widens as one climbs beyond the summit lines of 
the lower hills ; at turns in the path, where it 
crosses some rocky declivity, one looks out upon a 
landscape into which some new feature enters with 
every new outlook; one range of hills after another 
sinks below the level of vision, and discloses another 
strip of undiscovered country beyond ; and so one 
climbs, step by step, into the glory of a new world. 
The solitude, the silence, the radiant beauty of the 
morning, the expanding sweep of hills and valleys 
at one’s feet, fill one with eager longing for the un- 
broken circle of sky at the summit, and prepare one 
for the thrill of joy with which the soul answers 
the outspread vision. 

At last only a few rocks interpose between the 
summit and the last resting-place. I wait a mo- 
ment longer than I need, as one pushes back for 
an instant the cup from which he has long desired 
to drink. I even shun the noble vistas that open 
on either side, postponing to the moment of perfect 
achievement the partial successes already won. 


8o 


UNDER THE TREES. 


But the rocks are soon climbed, the summit is 
reached ! The world is at my feet — the mountain 
ranges like great billows, and the valleys, deep, far, 
and shadowy, between; and overhead the unbroken 
arch of sky melting into illimitable space through 
infinite gradations of blue. The vision which has 
haunted me so long with illusive hints of range 
and splendor is mine at last, and I have no greet- 
ing for it but the breathless eagerness with which I 
turn from point to point, as if to drink all in with 
one compelling glance. But the landscape does 
not yield its infinite variety to the first nor to the 
second glance ; the agitation of the first outlook 
gives place to a deep, calm joy; the eager desire to 
possess on the instant what has been won by long 
toil and patience is followed by a quiet mood which 
banishes all thought of self, and waits upon the 
hour and the scene for the revelation they will 
make in their own good time. Slowly the noble 
landscape reveals itself to me in its vast range and 
its marvelous variety. The somber groups of 
mountains to the west become distinct and majestic 
as I look into their deep recesses ; far off to the 
north the massive bulk and impressive outlines of 
a solitary peak grow upon me until it seems to 
dominate the whole country-side. A kingly mount- 
ain truly, of whose “ night of pines ” our saintly 
poet has sung; from this distance a vast and soft- 
ened shadow against the stainless sky. To the 
east one sees the long uplands, with slender spires 


ON THE HEIGHTS. 


81 


rising here and there from clustered homes ; to the 
south, a vast stretch of fertile fields, rolling like a 
fruitful sea to the horizon ; within the mighty 
circle, groups of lower hills, wooded valleys shad- 
owy and mysterious in the distance, villages and 
scattered homes. 

It was a deep saying of Goethe’s that “ on every 
height there lies repose.” A Sabbath stillness and 
solemnity reign in this upper sphere, where the 
sound of human toil never comes and the cry of 
humanity never penetrates. The boundaries that 
confine and baffle the vision along the walks of 
ordinary life have all faded out ; great States lie 
together in this outlook without visible lines of 
division or separation. The obstacles to sight 
which hourly baffle and confuse are gone ; from 
horizon to horizon all things are clear and visible, 
and the world is vast and beautiful to its remotest 
boundaries. The repose which lies on the heights 
of life is born of the vast and unclouded vision 
which looks down upon all obstacles, over all bar- 
riers, and takes in at a glance the mighty scope of 
human activity and the unbroken sky which over- 
hangs it continually like a visible infinity. On 
such heights it is the blessed reward of a few elect 
souls to live ; but the paths thither are open to 
every traveler. 


CHAPTER XV. 


UNDER COLLEGE ELMS. 

Stretched under the spreading branches of this 
noble elm, which has seen so many college genera- 
tions come and go, I have well-nigh forgotten that 
life has any limitations of space or time ; work, 
anxiety, weariness fade out of thought under a 
heaven from which every cloud has vanished, and 
the eye pierces everywhere the infinite depths of 
the upper firmament. Days are not always radiant 
here, and the stream of life as it flows through this 
tranquil valley is flecked with shadows ; but all 
sweet influences have combined to touch this pass- 
ing hour with unspeakable peace. Here are the 
old familiar footpaths trodden so often with hurry- 
ing feet in other years ; here are the well-worn 
seats about which familiar groups have so often 
gathered and sent the echoes of their songs flying 
heavenward ; here are the rooms which will never 
lose the sense of home because of those who have 
lived in them. The chapel bell tolls as of old, and 
the crowd comes hurrying along like the genera- 
tions before them, but the eye sees no familiar faces 
among them. It is a place of intense and rich 
living, and yet to-day, and for me, it is a place of 
82 


UNDER COLLEGE ELMS. 


S3 


memory. The life once lived here is as truly 
finished as if eternity had placed the impassable 
gulf between it and this quiet hour. These are the 
shores through which the river once passed, these 
the green fields which encircled it, these the mount- 
ains which flung their shadows over it, but the river 
itself has swept leagues onward. 

Mr. Higginson has written charmingly about 
“An Old Latin Text-Book,” and there is surely 
something magical in the power with which these 
well-worn volumes lay their spell upon us, and 
carry us back to other scenes and men. I have a 
copy of Virgil from which all manner of old-time 
things slip out as I open its pages. The eager en- 
thusiasm of the first dawning appreciation of the 
undying beauty of the old poet, faintly discerned 
in the language which embalms it, comes back like 
a whiff of fragrance from some by-gone summer. 
The potency of college memories lies in the fact 
that in those years we made the most memorable 
discoveries of our lives ; the unknown river may 
widen and deepen beyond our thought, but the 
most noteworthy moment in all our wanderings 
with it will always be the moment when we first 
came upon it, and there dawned upon us the sense 
of something new and great. To most boys this 
rich and never-to-be-forgotten experience comes in 
college. Except in cases of rare good fortune, a 
boy is not ripe for the literary spirit in the classic 
literature until the college atmosphere surrounds 


8 4 


UNDER THE TREES. 


him. To many it never discovers itself at all, and 
the languages which were dead at the beginning of 
study are dead at the end ; but to those in whom 
the instinct of scholarship is developed there comes 
a day when Virgil lives as truly as he lived in 
Dante’s imagination, and, like Boccaccio, they light 
a fire at his tomb which years do not quench. 

Who that has ever gone through the experience 
will forget the hour when he discovered the Greeks 
in Homer’s pages, and felt for the first time the 
grand impulse of that noble race stir his blood and 
fill his brain with the far-reaching aspiration for a 
life as rich as theirs in beauty, freedom, and 
strength ! It is told of an English scholar that he 
devoted his winters to the “ Iliad” and his sum- 
mers to the “ Odyssey,” reading each several times 
every year. One could hardly reconcile such self- 
indulgence with the claims of to-day on every 
man’s time and strength ; but I have no doubt all 
Grecians have a secret envy for such a career. 
The Old-World charm of the “ Odyssey ” is one of 
the priceless possessions of every fresh student, 
and to feel it for the first time is like discovering 
the sea anew. It is, indeed, the Epic of the Sea ; 
the only poem in all literature which gives the 
breadth, the movement, the mighty sweep of sky 
belted with stars, the unspeakable splendors of 
sunrise and sunset, — the grand, free life of the sea. 
I would place the “ Odyssey ” in every collection 
of modern books for the tonic quality that is in it. 


UNDER COLLEGE ELMS. 


85 


The dash of wave and the roar of wind play havoc 
with our melancholy, and fill us with shame that we 
have so much as asked the question, “ Is Life 
Worth Living ? ” 

There is no grander entrance gate to the great 
world of thought than the Greek Literature. Uni- 
versities are broadening their courses to meet the 
multiplied demands of modern knowledge and to 
fit men for the varied pursuits of modern life, but 
for those who desire familiarity with human life in 
its broadest expression, and especially for those 
who seek familiarity with the literary spirit and 
mastery of the literary art, Greek must hold its 
place in the curriculum to the end of time. This 
implies no disparagement of our own literature — a 
literature which spreads its dome over a wider 
world of feeling and knowledge than the Greek ever 
saw within the horizon of his experience ; but the 
Greek, like the Hebrew, will remain to the latest 
generation among the great teachers of men. He 
was born into the first rank among nations ; he 
had an eye quick to see, a mind clear, open, and 
bold to grasp facts, set them in order, and general- 
ize their law ; an instinct for art that turned all his 
observation and thinking into literature. Whether 
he looked at the world about him or fixed his gaze 
upon his own nature, his insight was from the very 
beginning so direct, so commanding, so perfectly 
allied with beauty, that his speculations became 
philosophy and his emotions poetry. There was 


86 


UNDER THE TREES . 


hardly any aspect of life which he did not see, no 
question which he did not ask, and few which he 
failed to answer with more or less of truth. He 
walked through an untrodden world of sights and 
sounds, and reproduced the vast circle of his life 
in a literature to which men will look as long as 
the world stands for models of sweetness, beauty, 
and power. Greek literature holds its place, not 
because scholars have combined to keep alive its 
traditions and make familiarity with it the bond of 
the fellowship of culture, but because it is the faith- 
ful reflection of the life of a race who faced the 
world on all sides with masterly intelligence and 
power. It is a liberal education to have traveled 
from Hischylus, with his almost Asiatic splendor of 
imagination, to Theocritus, under whose exquisite 
touch the soft outlines of Sicilian life took on idyl- 
lic loveliness ! 

And then there were those unbroken winter 
evenings, when one began really to know the great 
modern masters of literature. What would one not 
give to have them back again, with their undis- 
turbed hours ending- only when the fire or the lamp 
gave out ! Those were nights of royal fellowships, 
of introduction into the noblest society the world 
has ever known, and it is the recollection of this 
companionship which gives those days under col- 
lege roofs a unique and perennial charm. Then 
first the spirit of our own race was revealed to us 
in Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton ; then first we 


UNDER COLLEGE ELMS. 


87 


thrilled to that music which has never faltered 
since Caedmon found his voice in answer to the 
heavenly vision. There are days which will always 
have a place by themselves in our memory, nights 
whose stars have never set, because they brought 
us face to face with some great soul, and struck 
into life in an instant some new and mighty mean- 
ing. The ferment of soul which Hazlitt describes 
on the night when he walked home from his first 
talk with Coleridge is no exceptional experience ; 
it comes to most young men who are susceptible to 
the influence of great thoughts coming for the first 
time into consciousness. A lonely country road 
comes into view as I write these words, and over 
it the heavens bend with a new and marvelous 
splendor, because the boy who walked along its 
winding course had just finished for the first time, 
and in a perfect tumult of soul, Schiller’s ‘‘ Rob- 
bers”; it was the power of a great master, felt 
through his crudest work, that filled the night with 
such magical influences. 

The hours in which we come in contact with 
great souls are always memorable in our history, 
often the crises in our intellectual life ; it is the 
recollection of such hours that gives those bending 
elms an imperishable charm, and lends to this land- 
scape a deathless interest. 


CHAPTER XVI. 


A SUMMER MORNING* 

I do not understand how any one who ever 
watched the breaking of a summer day can question 
the noblest faiths of man. William Blake, with 
that integrity of insight which is often the pos- 
session of the true mystic, declared that when he 
was asked if he saw anything more in a sunset than 
a round disk of fire, he could only answer that he 
saw an innumerable company of the heavenly host 
crying “ Holy, Holy, Holy Lord God Almighty ! ” 
The birth of a day is a diviner miracle even than 
its death. They were true poets who wrote the old 
Vedic hymns and sang those wonderful adorations 
when the last stars were fading in the splendor of 
the dawn. Beside the glory of the sun’s announce- 
ment all royal progresses are tawdry and mean ; 
beside the beauty of the dawn, slowly unveiling the 
day while the heavens wait in silent worship, all 
poetry is idle and empty. It is the divinest of all 
the visible processes of nature, and the sublimest 
of all her marvelous symbolism. 

On such a morning as this, twelve years ago, 
Amiel wrote in his diary : “The whole atmosphere 
has a luminous serenity, a limpid clearness. The 
88 


A SUMMER MORNING. 


89 


islands are like swans swimming in a golden stream. 
Peace, splendor, boundless space ! .... I long to 
catch the wild bird, happiness, and tame it. These 
mornings impress me indescribably. They intoxi- 
cate me, they carry me away. I feel beguiled out 
of myself, dissolved in sunbeams, breezes, perfumes, 
and sudden impulses of joy. And yet all the time 
I pine for I know not what intangible Eden.” In 
these few words this master of poetic meditation 
suggests without expressing the indescribable im- 
pression which a summer carries into every sensi- 
tive nature. 

Last night the world was sorrowful, worn, and 
dulled ; but lo ! the new day has but touched it 
and all the invisible choirs are heard again ; the 
old hope returns like a tide, and out of the unseen 
depths a new life breaks soundless upon the unseen 
shores and sends its hidden currents into every 
dried and empty channel and pool. The worn old 
world has been created anew, and God has spoken 
again the word out of which all living things grow. 
In the silence and peace and freshness of this 
morning hour one feels the inspiration of nature as 
a direct and personal gift ; the inbreathing, which 
has renewed the beauty and fertility about him, 
renews his spirit also. He responds to the fresh 
and invigorating atmosphere with a soul sensitive 
with sudden return of zest to every beautiful sight 
and sound. No longeranalien in this world which 
has never known human care and regret, he enters 


9 ° 


UNDER THE TREES. 


by right of citizenship into all its privileges of un- 
watched freedom and unclouded serenity. One is 
not absorbed by the glory of the morning, but set 
free by it. There are times when Nature permits 
no rivalry ; she claims every thought and gives 
herself to us only as we give ourselves to her. 
She effaces us and takes complete possession of 
our souls. Not so, however, does she usurp the 
throne of our own personal life in those early 
hours when the sun, the master artist, whose touch 
has colored every leaf and tinted every flower, 
demands her adoration. Then it is, perhaps, that 
she turns her thoughts from all lesser companion- 
ships and, rapt in universal worship, suffers us to 
pass and repass as unnoticed as the idlers in the 
cathedral by those who kneel at the chancel rail. 

I confess I never find myself quite unmoved in 
this sacred hour, announced only by the stars veil- 
ing their faces and the birds breaking the silence 
with their tumultuous song. The universal faith 
becomes mine also, and from the common worship 
I am not debarred. My thought rises whither the 
mists, parted from the unseen censers, are rising : 
I feel within me the revival of aspirations and faiths 
that were fast overclouding ; the stir of old hopes 
is in my heart ; the thrill of old purposes is in my 
soul. Once more Nature is serving me in an hour 
of need ; serving me not by drawing me to herself, 
but by setting me free from a world that was begin- 
ning to master and make me its slave. 


A SUMMER MORNING. 


91 


Now all that insensibly growing servitude slips 
from me ; once more I am free and my own. The 
inexhaustible life that is behind all visible things, 
constantly flowing in upon us when we keep the 
channels open, recreates whatever was noblest and 
truest in me. With Nature, I believe ; and believ- 
ing, I also share in the universal worship. 

Emerson somewhere says, writing about the most 
difficult of Plato’s dialogues, that one must often 
wait long for the hour when one is strong enough 
to grapple with and master it, but sooner or later 
the fitting morning will come. It is the morning 
which gives us faith in the most arduous achieve- 
ments, and invigorates us to undertake them. In 
the morning all things are possible because the 
heavens and the earth are so visibly united in the 
fellowship of common life ; the one pouring down 
a measureless and penetrating tide of vitality, the 
other eagerly, worshipfully receptive. Nature has 
no more inspiring truth for us than this constant 
and complete enfolding of our life by a higher and 
vaster life, this unbroken play of a diviner purpose 
and force through us. Nothing is lost, nothing 
really dies ; all things are conserved by an energy 
which transforms, reorganizes, and perpetuates in 
new and finer forms all visible things. The silence 
of winter counterfeits the repose of death, but it is 
not even a pause of life ; invisibly to us the great 
movement goes on in the earth under our feet. 
While we watch by our household fires, the unseen 


92 


UNDER THE TREES . 


architects are planning the summer, and the sub- 
lime march of the stars is noiselessly bringing back 
the bloom and the perfume that seem to have van- 
ished forever. Every morning restores something 
we thought lost, recalls some charm that seemed to 
have escaped. 

In all noble natures there is an ineradicable 
idealism which constantly interprets life in its 
higher aspects. In the dust of the road the mount- 
ains sometimes disappear from our vision, but we 
know that they still loom in undiminished majesty 
against the horizon ; the gods sometimes hide 
themselves, but there is something within which 
affirms that we shall again look on their serene 
faces, calm amid our turbulence and unchanging 
amid our vicissitudes. It is this heavenly inheri- 
tance of insight and faith which makes Nature so 
divinely significant to us, and matches all its forms 
and phenomena with spiritual realities not to be 
taken from us by time or change or by that mys- 
terious angel of the last great transformation which 
we call death. The morning is always breaking 
over the low horizon lines of some sea or conti- 
nent ; voices of birds are always “ caroling against 
the gates of day ” ; and so, through unbroken 
light and song, our life is solemnly and sublimely 
moved onward to the dawn in which all the faint 
stars of our hope shall melt into the eternal day. 


CHAPTER XVII. 

A SUMMER NOON. 

The stir of the morning has given place to a 
silence broken only by the shrill whir of the locust. 
The distant shore lines that ran clear and white 
against the low background of green have become 
dim and indistinct ; all things are touched by a 
soft haze which changes the sentiment of the land- 
scape from movement to repose, from swift and 
multitudinous activity to the hush of sleep. The 
intense blue of the morning sky is dimmed and the 
great masses of trees are motionless. The distant 
harvest fields where the rhythmic lines of the 
mowers have moved alert and harmonious through 
the morning hours are deserted. On earth silence 
and rest, and in the great arch of the sky a sea of 
light so full and splendid that it seems almost to 
dim the fiery effluence of the sun itself. In such 
an hour one stretches himself under the trees, and 
in a moment the spell is on him, and he cares 
neither to think nor act ; he rejoices to lose him- 
self in the universal repose with which Nature, 
refreshes herself. The heat of the day is at its 
height, but for an hour the burden slips from the 
93 


94 


UNDER THE TREES. 


shoulders of care, and the rest comes in which the 
gains of work are garnered. 

The whir of the locust high overhead, by some 
earlier association, always recalls that matchless 
singer, some of whose notes Nature has never 
regained in all these later years. The whir of the 
cicada and the white light on the remote country 
road are real to us to-day, though one went silent 
and the other faded out of Sicilian skies two thou- 
sand years and more ago, because both are pre- 
served in the verse of Theocritus. The poet was 
something more than a mere observer of Nature, 
and the beautiful repose of his art more than the 
native grace and ease of one to whom life meant 
nothing more strenuous than a dream of a blue sea 
and fair sky. He had known the din of the 
crowded street as well as the silence of the country 
road, the forms and shows of a royal court as well 
as the simplicity and sincerity of tangled vines and 
gnarled olives on the hillside. He had seen, with 
those eyes which overlooked nothing, the pomps 
and vanities of power, the fret and fever of 
ambition, the impotence and barrenness of much of 
that activity in which multitudes of men spend their 
lives under the delusion that mere stir and bustle 
mean progress and achievement. Out of Syracuse, 
with its petty court about a petty tyrant, Theocri- 
tus had come back to the sea and the sky and the 
hardy pastoral life with a joy which touches some 
of his lines with penetrating tenderness. Better a 


A SUMMER NOON. 


95 


thousand times for him and for us the long, tran 
quil days under the pine and the olive than a great 
position under Hiero’s hand and the weary intrigue 
and activity which made the melancholy semblance 
of a successful life for men less wise and genuine. 
The lines which the hand of Theocritus has left on 
the past are few and marvelously delicate, but they 
seem to gain distinctness from the remorseless 
years that have almost obliterated the features of 
the age in which he lived. It is better to see 
clearly one or two things in life than to move con- 
fused and blinded in the dust of an impotent 
activity ; it is better to hear one or two notes sung 
in the overshadowing trees than to spend one’s years 
amid a murmur in which nothing is distinctly audi- 
ble. Theocritus, shunning courts and cities, sought 
to assuage the pain of life at the heart of Nature, 
and did not seek in vain. He gave himself calmly 
and sincerely to the sweet and natural life which 
surrounded him, and in his tranquil self-surrender 
he gained, unsuspecting, the immortality denied his 
eager and restless cotemporaries. Life is so vast, 
so unspeakably rich, that to have reported ac- 
curately one swift glimpse, or to have preserved 
the melody of one rarely heard note, is to have 
mastered a part of. the secret of the immortals. 

Struggle and anguish have their place in every 
genuine life, but they are the stages through which 
it advances to a strength which is full of repose. 
The bursting of the calyx announces the flower ; 


9 6 


UNDER THE TREES. 


but the beauty of the perfect blossoming obliterates 
the very memory of its earlier growth. The climb 
upward is often a long anguish, but the dust and 
weariness are forgotten when once the eye rests on 
the vast outlook. “ On every height there lies re- 
pose ” is the sublime declaration of one who had 
looked into most things deeper than his fellows, 
and had learned much of the profounder processes 
of life. Emerson long ago noted that even in 
action the forms of the Greek heroes are always in 
repose ; the crudity of passion, the distorting agony 
of half-mastered purpose, are lost in a self-forget- 
fulness which borrows from Olympus something of 
the repose of the gods. The sublime calm which 
imparts to great works of art a hint of eternity is 
born of complete mastery of life ; all the stages of 
evolution have been accomplished, the whole move- 
ment of growth has been fulfilled, before the hand 
of art sets the seal of perfection on the thing that 
is done. Shadow and light, heat and cold, tempest 
and quiet days, have all wrought together before 
the blooming of the flower which in its perfect 
grace and beauty gives no hint of its troubled 
growth. As the consummation of all toil and 
struggle and anguish, there comes at last that deep 
repose, born not of idleness and indifference, but of 
the harmony of all the elements in their last and 
finest form. 

In the unbroken silence of the noontide such 
thoughts come unbidden and almost unnoticed to 


A SUMMER NOON. 


97 


one who surrenders himself to the hour and the 
scene. Nature has her tempests, but her harvests 
are gathered amid the calm of days that often 
seem filled with the peace of heaven, and the 
mighty and irresistible movement of her life goes 
on in unbroken silence. The deepest thoughts are 
always tranquilizing, the greatest minds are always 
full of calm, the richest lives have always at heart 
an unshaken repose. 


CHAPTER XVIII. 


EVENTIDE. 

When the shadows lengthen and the landscape 
becomes indistinct, the common life of men seems 
to touch the life of Nature most closely and sym- 
pathetically. The work of the day is accomplished ; 
the sense of things to be done loses its painful ten- 
sion ; the mind, freed from the cares which en- 
grossed it, opens unconsciously to the sights and 
sounds of the quiet hour. The fields are given 
over to silence and the gathering darkness ; the 
roads cease to be thoroughfares of toil ; and over 
all things the peace of night settles like an un- 
spoken benediction. To the most preoccupied 
there comes a consciousness that the world has 
changed, and that, while the old framework re- 
mains intact, a strange and transforming beauty 
has touched and spiritualized it. At eventide one 
feels the soul of Nature as at no other hour. Her 
labors have ceased, her birds are silent ; she, too, 
rests, and in ceasing to do for us she gives us her- 
self. One by one the silvery points of light break 
out of the darkness overhead, and the faithful stars 
look down on the little earth they have watched 
98 


EVENTIDE. 


99 


over these countless years. The very names they 
bear recall the vanished races who waited for their 
appearing and counted them friends. Now that 
the lamps are lighted and the work of the day is 
done is it strange that the venerable mother, whose 
lullabies have soothed so many generations into 
sleep, should herself appeal to us in some intimate 
and personal way ? 

With the fading out of shore and sea and forest 
line something deeper and more spiritual rises in 
the soul as the mists rise on the lowlands and over 
the surface of the waters. We surrender ourselves 
to it silently, reverently, and a change no less sub- 
tle and penetrating is wrought in us. Our per- 
sonal ambitions, the sharply defined aims of our 
working hours, the very limitations of our individ- 
uality, are gone ; we lose ourselves in the larger 
life of which we are part. After the fret of the 
day we surrender ourselves to universal life as the 
bather, worn and spent, gives himself to the sea. 
There is no loss of personal force, but for an hour 
the individual activity is blended with the univer- 
sal movement and the peace and quiet of infinity 
calm and restore the soul. Meditation comes with 
eventide as naturally as action with the morning ; 
our soul opens to the soul of Nature, and we dis- 
cover anew that we are one. In the noblest pas- 
sage in Latin poetry Lucretius invokes the universal 
spirit of Nature, and identifies it with the creative 
force which impels the stars and summons the flow- 


ICO 


UNDER THE TREES. 


ers to strew themselves in the path of the sun. 
There is nothing so refreshing, so reinvigorating, 
as fresh contact with the fountain whence all visi- 
ble life flows, as a renewed sense of oneness with 
the mighty appearance of things in which we live. 
Now that all outlines are softened, all distinctive 
features are lost, Nature loses its materialism, and 
becomes to our thought the vast, silent, unbroken 
flow of force which the later science has substituted 
for an earlier and cruder conception. And this 
invisible stream leads us back, as our thoughts 
unconsciously follow it, to One whose thought it is 
and whose mind shares with our mind something 
of the unsearchable mystery of its purpose and 
nature. 

Some one has said that a man is great rather by 
reason of his unconscious thought than by reason 
of his deliberate and self-directed thinking. Re- 
leased from meditation on definite and special 
themes, the thought of a great man instinctively 
returns to the mystery of life. No poet creates a 
Hamlet unless he has brooded long and almost un- 
consciously on the deeper things that make up the 
inner life ; such a figure, forever externalizing the 
profounder and more obscure phases of being, is 
born of secret and habitual contact with the deep- 
est experiences and the most fundamental prob- 
lems. The mind of a Shakespeare must often, for- 
saking the busy world of actuality, meditate in the 
twilight which seems to release the soul of things 


E VENTJDE. 


IOI 


seen, and, veiling the actual, reveal the realities of 
existence. 

Revery becomes of the highest importance when 
it substitutes for definite thinking that deep and 
silent meditation in which alone the soul comes to 
know itself and pierces the wonderful movement of 
things about it to its source and principle. One of 
Amiel’s magical phrases is that in which he de- 
scribes revery as the Sunday of the soul. Toil 
over, care banished, the world forgotten, one com- 
munes with that which is eternal. In the long 
course of centuries the forests are as short-lived as 
the flowers ; all visible forms are but momentary 
expressions of the creative force. In the work of 
the greatest mind all spoken and written thoughts 
are but partial and passing utterances of a life of 
whose volume and movement they afford only half- 
comprehended hints. After a Shakespeare has 
written thirty immortal plays he must still feel that 
what was deepest in him is unuttered. There is 
that below all expression of life which remains for- 
ever unspoken and unspeakable ; it is ours, but we 
cannot share it with others ; we drop our plummets 
into its depths in vain. It is deeper than our 
thought, and it is only at rare moments, when we 
surrender ourselves to ourselves, that the sense of 
what it contains and means fills us with a sudden 
and overpowering consciousness of immortality. 
Out of this deeper life all great thoughts rise into 
consciousness, losing much by imprisonment in any 


T 02 


UNDER THE TREES. 


form of speech, but still bringing with them in- 
dubitable evidence of their more than royal birth. 
From time to time, like the elder race of prophets, 
they enter into our speech and renew the fading 
sense of the divinity of life, and so, through in- 
dividual souls, the deeper truths are retold from 
generation to generation. 

As one meditates in this evening hour, the dark- 
ness has gathered over the world and folded it out 
of sight. The few faint stars have become a 
shining host, and the immeasurable heavens have 
substituted for the near and familiar beauty of the 
earth their own sublime and awful commingling of 
unsearchable darkness and unquenchable light. So 
in every human life the near and the familiar is 
overarched by infinity and eternity. 


CHAPTER XIX. 


THE TURN OF THE TIDE. 

For days past there have been intangible hints 
of change in earth and air ; the birds are silent, 
and the universal strident note of insect life makes 
more musical to memory the melodies of the earlier 
season. The sense of overflowing vitality which 
pervaded all things a few days ago, when the tide 
was at the flood, has gone ; the tide has turned, 
and already one sees the receding movement of the 
ebb. Through all the vanished months of flower 
and song, one’s thought has traveled fast upon the 
advancing march of summer, trying to keep pace 
with it as it pushed its fragrant conquest north- 
ward ; to-day there is a brief interval of pause be- 
fore the same thought, following the sunshine, turns 
south again, and seeks the tropics. A little later 
the spell of an indescribable peace will rest upon 
the earth, but a peace that will be but a brief 
truce between elements soon to close in struggle 
again. To-day, however, one feels the repose of a 
finished work before the first mellow touch of 
decay has come. The full, rich foliage still shel- 
ters the paths upon which the leaves have not yet 
fallen ; the meadows are green ; the skies soft 
103 


104 


UNDER THE TREES. 


and benignant. The conquest of summer is still 
intact, but here and there one sees slight but un- 
mistakable evidence that the garrison, under cover 
of night, is beginning its long retreat. In such a 
moment one feels a sudden sense of loneliness, as 
if a friend were secretly preparing to desert one to 
his foes. 

In this pause of the season one finds the subtle 
beauty and completeness of the summer growing 
upon him more and more. While the work was 
going forward, there was such profound interest in 
the process that one watched the turn and direction 
of the chisel rather than the surface of the marble 
slowly answering, line by line, the overmastering 
thought ; but now that the months of toil are past, 
and all the implements of labor are cast aside, the 
finished work absorbs all thought and fills all 
imaginations. So vast is it, and on such a scale of 
magnitude, that one hardly saw before the delicacy 
and exquisite adjustment of parts, the marvelous 
art that framed the smallest leaf and touched the 
vagrant wild flower still blooming on the edges of 
the woodland. It is, after all, when the great festi- 
val days are over and the thronging crowds have 
gone, that the true worshiper finds the temple 
beautiful with the highest visions of worship, and 
in the silence of deserted aisles and shrines sees 
with new wonder the workmanship of the Deity. 
For ali such this is the most solemn of all the re- 
curring Sabbaths of the year ; the hush at noonday 


THE TURN OF THE TIDE. 105 

and at even is itself an unspoken prayer. The 
moment of completion in the history of any great 
work is always sacred. When the noise and dust 
of the working days are gone, the great illuminat- 
ing thought shines out unobscured ; and in the 
perception of this universal element, which on the 
instant wins recognition from every mind, the per- 
sonal element vanishes ; the mere skill of the 
workman is forgotten in the new revelation of soul 
which it has given the world. For the same reason 
Nature takes on in these few and peaceful days a 
spiritual aspect, and the most careless finds himself 
touched, perhaps saddened, he knows not how or 
why. 

Now again is the old mystery and deep secret 
of life forced upon thought : “ Except a grain of 
wheat fall into the earth and die, it abideth by itself 
alone ; but if it die, it beareth much fruit.” When 
the tide was at the flood it was enough to breathe 
the air and listen to the magical music of advanc- 
ing life ; but now, when the tide begins to recede 
and leave the vast shores bare and silent, one must 
think, whether he will or not. Nature, that was 
careless poet, flower-crowned and buoyant with the 
promise of eternal youth, turns teacher, and will 
not suffer us to escape the deeper truths, the more 
searching and awful lessons. As the physical falls 
away the spiritual comes into clear and compelling 
distinctness. Who that goes abroad in these quiet 
days, and feels the subtle change from the grosser 


106 UNDER THE TREES. 

to the ethereal which pervades the very air, can 
escape the threefold thought of Life, Death, and 
Immortality ? 

The silence that has already fallen upon the 
jubilant voices of summer will extend and deepen 
day by day until even the thoughtless babbling of 
the brooks ceases and the hush becomes universal. 
The earth, that a little time ago was producing 
such an endless variety of forms of life and beauty, 
will give birth to a myriad thoughts, deep, spiritual, 
and far-reaching ; translating into the language of 
spirit the vast movement of the year, and complet- 
ing its mysterious cycle with a vision of the sublime 
ends for which Nature stands, and to the consum- 
mation of which all things are borne forward. And 
when the time is ripe there will come a transforma- 
tion like the descent of the heavens upon the earth, 
flooding the dying world with unspeakable splen- 
dors ; the sunset which closes the long summer 
day and leaves through the night of winter the 
fadeless promise of another dawn. 


IN THE FOREST OF ARDEN. 


Go with me : if you like, upon report, 

The soil, the profit, and this kind of life, 

I will your very faithful factor be. 

And buy it with your gold right suddenly. 


“ AND I FOR ROSALIND.” 


CHAPTER XX. 

IN THE FOREST OF ARDEN. 


I. 

Under the greenwood tree, 

Who loves to lie with me, 

And turn his merry note 
Unto the sweet bird’s throat, 

Come hither, come hither, come hither. 

Rosalind had just laid a spray of apple blos- 
soms on the study table. 

“ Well,” I said, “when shall we start ?” 

“ To-morrow.” 

Rosalind has a habit of swift decision when she 
has settled a question in her own mind, and I was 
not surprised when she replied with a single deci- 
sive word. But she also has a habit of making thor- 
ough preparation for any undertaking, and now she 
was quietly proposing to go off for the summer the 
very next day, and not a trunk was packed, not a 
seat secured in any train, not a movement made 
toward any winding up of household affairs. I 
had great faith in her ability to execute her plans 
with celerity, but I doubted whether she could be 
ready to turn the key in the door, bid farewell to 
the milkman and the butcher, and start the very 
next day for the Forest of Arden. For several past 


109 


I IO 


UNDER THE TREES. 


seasons we had planned this bold excursion into 
a country which few persons have seemed to know 
much about since the day when a poet of great 
fame, familiar with many strange climes and 
peoples, found his way thither and shared the 
golden fortune of his journey with all the world. 
Winter after winter before the study fire, we had 
made merry plans for this trip into the magical 
forest ; we had discussed the best methods of trav- 
eling where no roads led ; we had enjoyed in an- 
ticipation the surmises of our neighbors concerning 
our unexplained absence, and the delightful mystery 
which would always linger about us when we had 
returned, with memories of a landscape which no 
eyes but ours had seen these many years, and of 
rare and original people whose voices had been 
silent in common speech so many generations that 
only a few dreamers like ourselves even remem- 
bered that they had ever spoken. We had looked 
along the library shelves for the books we should 
take with us, until we remembered that in that 
country there were books in the running streams. 
Rosalind had gone so far as to lay aside a certain 
volume of sermons whose aspiring note had more 
than once made music of the momentary discords 
of her life ; but I reminded her that such a work 
would be strangely out of place in a forest where 
there were sermons in stones. Finally we had de- 
cided to leave books behind and go free-minded as 
well as free-hearted. It had been a serious ques- 


IN THE FOREST OF ARDEN. 


ill 


tion how much and what apparel we should take 
with us, and that point was still unsettled when 
the apple trees came to their blossoming. It is a 
theory of mine that the chief delight of a vacation 
from one’s usual occupations is freedom from the 
tyranny of plans and dates, and thus much Rosalind 
had conceded to me. 

There had been an irresistible charm in the very 
secrecy which protected our adventure from the 
curious and unsympathetic comment of the world. 
We found endless pleasure in imagining what this 
and that good neighbor of ours would say about 
the folly of leaving a comfortable house, good 
beds, and a well-stocked larder for the hard fare and 
uncertain shelter of a strange forest. “ For my 
part,” we gleefully heard Mrs. Grundy declare, — 
“ for my part, I cannot understand why two people 
old enough to know better should make tramps of 
themselves and go rambling about a piece of woods 
that nobody ever heard of in the heat of the mid- 
summer.” Poor Mrs. Grundy ! We could well 
afford to laugh merrily at her scornful expostula- 
tions ; for while she was repeating platitudes to 
overdressed and uninteresting people at Oldport, 
we should be making sunny play of life with men 
and women whose thoughts were free as the wind, 
and whose hearts were fresh as the dew and the 
stars. And often when our talk had died into 
silence, and the wind without whistled to the fire 
within, we had fallen to dreaming of those shadowy 


I 12 


UNDER THE TREES. 


aisles arched by the mighty trees, and of the 
splendid pageant that should make life seem as 
great and rich as Nature herself. I confess that 
all my dreams came to one ending ; that I should 
suddenly awake in some golden hour and really 
know Rosalind. Of course I had been coming 
through all these years to know something about 
Rosalind ; but in this busy world, with work to be 
done, and bills to be paid, and people to be seen, 
and journeys to be made, and friction and worry 
and fatigue to be borne, how can we really come 
to know one another ? We may meet the vicissi- 
tudes and changes side by side ; we may work 
together in the long days of toil ; our hearts may 
repose on a common trust, our thoughts travel a 
common road ; but how rarely do we come to the 
hour when the pressure of toil is removed, the 
clouds of anxiety melt into blue sky, and in the 
whole world nothing remains but the sun on the 
flower, and the song in the trees, and the unclouded 
light of love in the eyes ? 

I dreamed, too, that in finding Rosalind I should 
also find myself. There were times when I had 
seemed on the very point of making this discovery, 
but something had always turned me aside when 
the quest was most eager and promising ; the 
world pressed into the seclusion for which I had 
struggled, and when I waited to hear its faintest 
murmur die in the distance, suddenly the tumult 
had risen again, and the dream of self-communion 


IN THE FOREST OF ARDEN. II 3 

and self-knowledge had vanished. To get out of 
the uproar and confusion of things, I had often 
fancied, would be like exchanging the dusty mid- 
summer road for the shade of the woods where the 
brook calms the day with its pellucid note of effort- 
less flow, and the hours hide themselves from the 
glances of the sun. In the forest of Arden I felt 
sure I should find the repose, the quietude, the 
freedom of thought, which would permit me to 
know myself. There, too, I suspected Nature had 
certain surprises for me ; certain secrets which she 
has been holding back for the fortunate hour when 
her spell would be supreme and unbroken. I even 
hoped that I might come unaware upon that 
ancient and perennial movement of life upon which 
I seemed always to happen the very second after it 
had been suspended ; that I might hear the note of 
the hermit thrush breaking out of the heart of the 
forest ; the soulful melody of the nightingale, 
pathetic with unappeasable sorrow. In the Forest 
of Arden, too, there were unspoiled men and 
women, as indifferent to the fashion of the world 
and the folly of the hour as the stars to the impal- 
pable mist of the clouds ; men and women who 
spoke the truth, and saw the fact, and lived the 
right ; to whom love and faith and high hopes were 
more real than the crowns of which they had been 
despoiled and the kingdoms from which they had 
been rejected. All this I had dreamed, and I 
know not how many other brave and beautiful 


UNDER THE TREES. 


114 

dreams, and I was dreaming them again when 
Rosalind laid the apple blossoms on the study 
table, and answered, decisively, “ To-morrow.” 

“ To-morrow,” I repeated ; “ to-morrow. But 
how are you going to get ready ? If you sit up all 
night you cannot get through with the packing. 
You said only yesterday that your summer dress- 
making was shamefully behind. My dear, next 
week is the earliest possible time for our going.” 

Rosalind laughed archly, and pushed the apple 
blossoms over the woefully interlined manuscript 
of my new article on Egypt. There was in her 
very attitude a hint of unsuspected buoyancy and 
strength ; there was in her eyes a light which I 
have never seen under our uncertain skies. The 
breath of the apple blossoms filled the room, and a 
bobolink, poised on a branch outside the window, 
suddenly poured a rapturous song into the silence 
of the sweet spring day. I laid down my pen, 
pushed my scattered sheets into the portfolio, 
covered the inkstand, and laid my hand in hers. 
“ Not to-morrow,” I said, “ not to-morrow. Let 
us go now.” 


11. 

Now go we in content 
To liberty and not to banishment. 

I have sometimes entertained myself by trying 
to imagine the impressions which our modern life 


IN THE FOREST OF ARDEN. 115 

would make upon some sensitive mind of a remote 
age. I have fancied myself rambling about New 
York with Montaigne, and taking note of his shrewd, 
satirical comment. I can hardly imagine him ex- 
pressing any feeling of surprise, much less any 
sentiment of admiration ; but I am confident that 
under a masque of ironical self-complacency the 
old Gascon would find it difficult to repress his 
astonishment, and still more difficult to adjust his 
mind to evident and impressive changes. I have 
ventured at times to imagine myself in the company 
of another more remote and finely organized spirit 
of the past, and pictured to myself the keen, dis- 
passionate criticism of Pericles on the things of 
modern habit and creation ; I have listened to his 
luminous interpretations of the changed conditions 
which he saw about him ; I have noted his uncon- 
cern toward the merely material advances of so- 
ciety, his penetrative insight into its intellectual 
and moral developments. A mind so capacious 
and open, a nature so trained and poised, could 
not be otherwise than self-contained and calm even 
in the presence of changes so vast and manifold as 
those which have transformed society since the 
days of the great Athenian ; but even he could not 
be quite unmoved if brought face to face with a life 
so unlike that with which he had been familiar ; 
there must come, even to one who feels the mastery 
of the soul over all conditions, a certain sense of 
wonder and awe. 


n6 UNDER THE TREES. 

It was with some such feeling that Rosalind and 
I found ourselves in the Forest of Arden. The 
journey was so soon accomplished that we had no 
time to accustom ourselves to the changes between 
the country we had left and that to which we had 
come. We had always fancied that the road would 
be long and hard, and that we should arrive worn 
and spent with the fatigues of travel. We were 
astonished and delighted when we suddenly dis- 
covered that we were within the boundaries of the 
Forest long before we had begun to think of the 
end of our journey. We had said nothing to each 
other by the way ; our thoughts were so busy that 
we had no time for speech. There were no other 
travelers ; everybody seemed to be going in the 
opposite direction ; and we were left to undisturbed 
meditation. The route to the Forest is one of those 
open secrets which whosoever would know must 
learn for himself ; it is impossible to direct those 
who do not discover for themselves how to make 
the journey. The Forest is probably the most 
accessible place on the face of the earth, but it is 
so rarely visited that one may go half a lifetime 
without meeting a person who has been there. I 
have never been able to explain the fact that those 
who have spent some time in the Forest, as well as 
those who are later to see it, seem to recognize each 
other by instinct. Rosalind and I happen to have 
a large circle of acquaintances, and it has been our 
good fortune to meet and recognize many who 


IN THE FOREST OF ARDEN. 117 

were familiar with the Forest and who were able to 
tell us much about its localities and charms. It is 
not generally known, and it is probably wise not to 
emphasize the fact, that the fortunate few who have 
access to the Forest form a kind of secret frater- 
nity ; a brotherhood of the soul which is secret be- 
cause those alone who are qualified for member- 
ship by nature can understand either its language 
or its aims. It is a very strange thing that the 
dwellers in the Forest never make the least attempt 
at concealment, but that, no matter how frank and 
explicit their statements may be, nobody outside 
the brotherhood ever understands where the Forest 
lies or what one finds when he gets there. One 
may write what he chooses about life in the Forest, 
and only those whom Nature has selected and 
trained will understand what he discloses ; to all 
others it will be an idle tale or a fairy story for the 
entertainment of people who have no serious busi- 
ness in hand. 

I remember well the first time I ever understood 
that there is a Forest of Arden, and that they who 
choose may wander through its arched aisles of 
shade and live at their will in its deep and beauti- 
ful solitude ; a solitude in which nature sits like a 
friend from whose face the veil has been with- 
drawn, and whose strange and foreign utterance 
has been exchanged for the most familiar speech. 
Since that memorable afternoon under the apple 
trees I have never been far from the Forest, al- 


n8 


UNDER THE TREES. 


though at times I have lost sight of the line which 
its foliage makes against the horizon. I have 
always intended to cross that line some day and to 
explore the Forest ; perhaps even to make a home 
for myself there. But one’s dreams must often 
wait for their realization, and so it has come to 
pass that I have gone all these years without per- 
sonal familiarity with these beautiful scenes. I 
have since learned that one never comes to the 
Forest until he is thoroughly prepared in heart and 
mind, and I understand now that I could not have 
come earlier even if I had made the attempt. As 
it happened, I concerned myself with other things, 
and never approached very near the Forest, al- 
though never very far from it. I was never quite 
happy unless I caught frequent glimpses of its dis- 
tant boughs, and I searched more and more ea- 
gerly for those who had left some record of their 
journeys to the Forest, and of their life within its 
magical boundaries. I discovered, to my great 
joy, that the libraries were full of books which had 
much to say about the delights of Arden : its en- 
chanting scenery ; the music of its brooks ; the 
sweet and refreshing repose of its recesses ; the 
noble company that frequent it. I soon found that 
all the greater poets have been there, and that their 
lines had caught the magical radiance of the sky ; 
and many of the prose writers showed the same 
familiarity with a country in which they evidently 
found whatever was sweetest and best in life. I 


IN THE FOREST OF ARDEN. 119 

came to know at last those whose knowledge of 
Arden was most complete, and I put them in a 
place by themselves ; a corner in the study to 
which Rosalind and I went for the books we read 
together. I would gladly give a list of these works 
but for the fact I have already hinted — that those 
who would understand their references to Arden 
will come to know them without aid from me, and 
that those who would not understand could find 
nothing in them even if I should give page and 
paragraph. It was a great surprise to me, when I 
first began to speak of the Forest, to find that most 
people scouted the very idea of such a country ; 
many did not even understand what I meant. 
Many a time, at sunset, when the light has lain soft 
and tender on the distant Forest, I have pointed it 
out, only to be told that' what I thought was the 
Forest was a splendid pile of clouds, a shining mass 
of mist. I came to understand at last that Arden 
exists only for a few, and I ceased to talk about it 
save to those who shared my faith. Gradually I 
came to number among my friends many who were 
in the habit of making frequent journeys to the 
Forest, and not a few who had spent the greater 
part of their lives there. I remember the first time 
I saw Rosalind I saw the light of the Arden sky in 
her eyes, the buoyancy of the Arden air in her 
step, the purity and freedom of the Arden life in 
her nature. We built our home within sight of the 
Forest, and there was never a day that we did not 


120 


UNDER THE TREES. 


talk about and plan our long-delayed journey 
thither. 

“After all,” said Rosalind, on that first glorious 
morning in Arden, “as I look back I see that we 
were always on the way here.” 


hi. 

Well, this is the Forest of Arden. 

The first sensation that comes to one who finds 
himself at last within the boundaries of the Forest 
of Arden is a delicious sense of freedom. I am 
not sure that there is not a certain sympathy with 
outlawry in that first exhilarating consciousness of 
having gotten out of the conventional world — the 
world whose chief purpose is that all men shall 
wear the same coat, eat the same dinner, repeat the 
same polite commonplaces, and be forgotten at last 
under the same epitaph. Forests have been the 
natural refuge of outlaws from the earliest time, 
and among the most respectable persons there has 
always been an ill-concealed liking for Robin Hood 
and the whole fraternity of the men of the bow. 
Truth is above all things characteristic of the 
dwellers in Arden, and it must be frankly confessed 
at the beginning, therefore, that the Forest is given 
over entirely to outlaws ; those who have commit- 
ted some grave offense against the world of con- 
ventions, or who have voluntarily gone into exile 


IN THE FOREST OF ARDEN. 


121 


out of sheer liking for a freer life. These persons 
are not vulgar law-breakers ; they have neither 
blood on their hands nor ill-gotten gains in their 
pockets ; they are, on the contrary, people of un- 
commonly honest bearing and frank speech. Their 
offenses evidently impose small burden on their 
conscience, and they have the air of those who have 
never known what it is to have the Furies on one’s 
track. Rosalind was struck with the charming 
naturalness and gayety of every one we met in our 
first ramble on that delicious and never-to-be-for- 
gotten morning when we arrived in Arden. There 
was neither assumption or diffidence ; there was 
rather an entire absence of any kind of self-con- 
sciousness. Rosalind had fancied that we might 
be quite alone for a time, and we had expected to 
have a few days to ourselves. We had even 
planned in our romantic moments — and there is 
always a good deal of romance among the dwellers 
in Arden — a continuation of our wedding journey 
during the first week. 

“ It will be so much more delightful than be- 
fore/’ suggested Rosalind, “because nobody will 
stare at us, and we shall have the whole world to 
ourselves.” In that last phrase I recognized the 
ideal wedding journey, and was not at all dismayed 
at the prospect of having no society but Rosalind's 
for a time. But all such anticipations were dis- 
pelled in an hour. It was not that we met many 
people — it is one of the delights of the Forest that 


122 


UNDER THE TREES . 


one finds society enough to take away the sense of 
isolation, but not enough to destroy the sweetness 
of solitude ; it was rather that the few we met made 
us feel at once that we had equal claim with them- 
selves on the hospitality of the place. The Forest 
was not only free to every comer, but it evidently 
gave peculiar pleasure to those who were living in 
it to convey a sense of ownership to those who were 
arriving for the first time. Rosalind declared that 
she felt as much at home as if she had been born there; 
and she added that she was glad she had brought 
only the dress she wore. I was a little puzzled 
by the last remark ; it seemed not entirely logical. 
But I saw presently that she was expressing the 
fellowship of the place which forbade that one 
should possess anything that was not in use, and 
that, therefore, was not adding constantly to the 
common stock of pleasure. Concerning the feel- 
ing of having been born in Arden, I became con- 
vinced later that there was good reason for believ- 
ing that everybody who loved the place had been 
born there, and that this fact explained the home 
feeling which came to one the instant he set foot 
within the Forest. It is, in fact, the only place I 
have known which seemed to belong to me and to 
everybody else at the same time ; in which I felt 
no alien influence. In our own home I had some- 
thing of the same feeling, but when I looked from 
a window or set foot from a door I was instantly 
oppressed with a sense of foreign ownership. In 


IN THE FOREST OF ARDEN. 


123 


the great world how little could I call my own ! 
Only a few feet of soil out of the measureless land- 
scape ; only a few trees and flowers out of all that 
boundless foliage ! I seemed driven out of the 
heritage to which I was born ; cheated out of my 
birthright in the beauty of the field and the mys- 
tery of the Forest ; put off with the beggarly por- 
tion of a younger son when I ought to have fallen 
heir to the kingdom. My chief joy was that from 
the little space I called my own I could see the 
whole heavens ; no man could rob me of that 
splendid vision. 

In Arden, however, the question of ownership 
never comes into one’s thoughts ; that the Forest 
belongs to you gives you a deep joy, but there is a 
deeper joy in the consciousness that it belongs to 
everybody else. 

The sense of freedom, which comes as strongly 
to one in Arden as the smell of the sea to one who 
has made a long journey from the inland, hints, I 
suppose, at the offense which makes the dwellers 
within its boundaries outlaws. For one reason or 
another, they have all revolted against the rule of 
the world, and the world has cast them out. They 
have offended smug respectability, with its passion- 
less devotion to deportment ; they have outraged 
conventional usage, that carefully devised system 
by which small natures attempt to bring great ones 
down to their own dimensions ; they have scandal- 
ized the orthodoxy which, like Memnon, has lost 


124 


UNDER THE TREES. 


the music of its morning, and marvels that the 
world no longer listens ; they have derided vener- 
able prejudices — those ugly relics by which some 
men keep in remembrance their barbarous an- 
cestry ; they have refused to follow flags whose 
battle were won or lost ages ago ; they have scorned 
to compromise with untruth, to go with the crowd, to 
acquiesce in evil “ for the good of the cause,” to 
speak when they ought to keep silent and to keep 
silent when they ought to speak. Truly the lists of 
sins charged to the account of Arden is a long one, 
and were it not that the memory of the world, con- 
cerned chiefly with the things that make for its 
comfort, is a short one, it would go ill with the 
lovers of the Forest. More than once it has hap- 
pened that some offender has suffered so long a 
banishment that he has taken permanent refuge in 
Arden, and proved his citizenship there by some 
act worthy of its glorious privileges. In the Forest 
one comes constantly upon traces of those who, 
like Dante and Milton, have found there a refuge 
from the Philistinism of a world that often hates its 
children in exact proportion to their ability to give 
it light. For the most part, however, the outlaws 
who frequent the Forest suffer no longer banish- 
ment than that which they impose on themselves. 
They come and go at their own sweet will ; and 
their coming, I suspect, is generally a matter of 
their own choosing. The world still loves dark- 
ness more than light ; but it rarely nowadays falls 


IN THE FOREST OF ARDEN. 125 

upon the lantern-bearer and beats the life out of 
him, as in “ the good old times.” The world has 
grown more decent and polite, although still at 
heart no doubt the bad old world which stoned the 
prophets. It sneers where it once stoned ; it 
rejects and scorns where it once beat and burned. 
And so Arden has become a refuge, not so much 
from persecution and hatred as from ignorance, in- 
difference, and the small wounds of small minds 
bent upon stinging that which they cannot destroy. 


IV. 

.... Fleet the time carelessly, as they did in the golden 
world. 

Rosalind and I have always been planning to 
do a great many pleasant things when we had more 
time. During the busy days when we barely found 
opportunity to speak to each other we were always 
thinking of the better days when we should be able 
to sit hours together with no knock at the door 
and no imperative summons from the kitchen. 
Some man of sufficient eminence to give his words 
currency ought to define life as a series of inter- 
ruptions. There are a good many valuable and 
inspiring things which can only be done when one 
is in the mood, and to secure a mood is not always 
an easy matter : there are moods which are as coy 
as the most high-spirited woman, and must be wooed 
with as much patience and tact : and when the 


126 


UNDER THE TREES. 


illusive prize is gained, one holds it by the frailest 
tenure. An interruption diverts the current, cuts 
the golden thread, breaks the exquisite harmony. 
I have often thought that Dante was far less unfor- 
tunate than the world has judged him to be. If he 
had been courted and crowned instead of rejected 
and exiled, it might have been that his genius 
would have missed the conditions which gave it 
immortal utterance. Left to himself, he had only 
his own nature to reckon with ; the world passed 
him by, and left him to the companionship of his 
sublime and awful dreams. To be left alone with 
one’s self is often the highest good fortune. More- 
over, I detest being hurried : it seems to me the 
most offensive way in which we are reminded of 
our mortality ; there is time enough if we know 
how to use it. People who, like Goethe, never 
rest and never haste, complete their work and 
escape the friction of it. 

One of the most delightful things about life in 
Arden is the absence of any sense of haste ; life 
is a matter of being rather than of doing, and 
one shares the tranquillity of the great trees that 
silently expand year by year. The fever and rest- 
lessness are gone, the long strain of nerve and will 
relaxed ; a delicious feeling of having strength and 
time enough to live one’s life and do one’s work 
fills one with a deep and enduring sense of repose. 

Rosalind, who had been busy about so many 
things that I sometimes almost lost sight of her for 


IN THE FOREST OF ARDEN. 


127 


days together, found time to take long walks with 
me, to watch the birds and the clouds, and talk by 
the hour about all manner of pleasant trifles. I 
came to feel after a time that just what I antici- 
pated would happen in Arden had happened. I 
was fast becoming acquainted with her. We spent 
days together in the most delightful half-vocal and 
half-silent fellowship ; leaving everything to the 
mood of the hour and the place. Our walks took 
us sometimes into lovely recesses, where mutual 
confidences seemed as natural as the air ; some- 
times into solitudes where talk seemed an imper- 
tinence, and we were silent under the spell of 
rustling leaves and thrilling melodies coming from 
we knew not what hidden minstrelsy. But whether 
silent or speaking, we were fast coming to know 
each other. I saw many traits in her, many charac- 
teristic habits and movements which I had never 
noted before ; and I was conscious that she was 
making similar discoveries in me. These mutual 
revelations absorbed us during our first days in the 
Forest ; and they confirmed the impression which 
I brought with me that half the charm of people is 
lost under the pressure of work and the irritation 
of haste. We rarely know our best friends on their 
best side ; our vision of their noblest selves is 
constantly obscured by the mists of preoccupation 
and weariness. 

In Arden life is pitched on the natural key ; no- 
body is ever hurried ; nobody is ever interrupted ; 


128 


UNDER THE TREES. 


nobody carries his work like a pack on his back 
instead of leaving it behind him as the sun leaves 
the earth when the day is over and the calm stars 
shine in the unbroken silence of the sky. Rosalind 
and I were entirely conscious of the transformation 
going on within us, and were not slow to submit 
ourselves to its beneficent influence. We felt that 
Arden would not put all its resources into our 
hand until we had shaken off the dust and parted 
from the fret of the world we had left behind. 

In those first inspiring days we went oftenest to 
the heart of the pines, where the moss grew so deep 
that our movements were noiseless ; where the light 
fell in subdued and gentle tones among the closely 
clustered trees ; and where no sound ever reached 
us save the organ music of the great boughs when 
the wind evoked their sublime harmonies. Many 
a time, as we have sat silent while the tones of that 
majestic symphony rose and fell about us, we 
seemed to become a part of the scene itself ; we 
felt the unfathomed depth of a music produced by 
no conscious thought, wrought out by no conscious 
toil, but akin, in its spontaneity and naturalness, 
with the fragrance of the flower. And with these 
thrilling notes there came to us the thought of the 
calm, reposeful, irresistible growth of Nature ; 
never hasting, never at rest ; the silent spreading 
of the tree, the steady burning of the star, the 
noiseless flow of the river ! Was not this sublime 
unconsciousness of time, this glorious appropria- 


IN THE FOREST OF ARDEN. 


129 


tion of eternity, something we had missed all our 
lives, and, in missing it, had lost our birthright of 
quiet hours, calm thought, sweet fellowship, ripen- 
ing character ? The fever and tumult of the world 
we had left were discords in a strain that had never 
yielded its music before. 

For nature beats in perfect tune, 

And rounds with rhyme her every rune, 

Whether she work in land or sea, 

Or hide underground her alchemy. 

Thou canst not wave thy staff in air, 

Or dip thy paddle in the lake, 

But it carves the bow of beauty there, 

And the ripples in rhymes the oars forsake. 

After one of these long, delicious days in the 
heart of the pines, Rosalind slipped her hand in 
mine as we walked slowly homeward. 

“ This is the first day of my life,” she said. 


v. 

And this our life, exempt from public haunt, 

Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, 
Sermons in stones, and good in everything. 

It was one of those entrancing mornings when 
the earth seems to have been made over under 
cover of night, and one drinks the first draft of a 
new experience when he sees it by the light of a 
new day. Such mornings are not uncommon in 
Arden, where the nightly dews work a perpetual 


130 


UNDER THE TREES. 


miracle of freshness. On this particular morning 
we had strayed long and far, the silence and soli- 
tude of the woods luring us hour after hour with 
unspoken promises to the imagination. We had 
come at length to a place so secluded, so remote 
from stir and sound, that one might dream there of 
the sacredness of ancient oracles and the revels of 
ancient gods. 

Rosalind had gathered wild flowers along the 
way, and sat at the base of a great tree intently 
disentangling her treasures. With that figure be- 
fore me, I thought of nearer and more sacred 
things than the old woodland gods that might have 
strayed that way centuries ago ; I had no need to 
recall the vanished times and faiths to interpret the 
spirit of an hour so far from the commonplaces of 
human speech, so free from the passing moods of 
human life. The sweet unconsciousness of that 
face, bent over the mass of wild flowers, and akin 
to them in its unspoiled loveliness, was to that 
hour and place like the illuminated capital in the 
old missal ; a ray of color which unlocked the dark 
mystery of the text. When one can see the loveli- 
ness of a wild flower, and feel the absorbing charm 
of its sentiment, one is not far from the kingdom of 
Nature. 

As these fancies chased one another across my 
mind, lying there at full length on the moss, I, too, 
seemed to lose all consciousness that I had ever 
touched life at any point than this, or that any 


IN THE FOREST OF ARDEN. 13 1 

other hour had ever pressed its cup of experience 
to my lips. The great world of which I was once 
part disappeared out of memory like a mist that 
recedes into a faint cloud and lies faint and far on 
the boundaries of the day ; my own personal life, to 
which I had been bound by such a multitude of gos- 
samer threads that when I tried to unloose one I 
seemed to weave a hundred in its place, seemed to 
sink below the surface of consciousness. I ceased to 
think, to feel ; I was conscious only of the vast and 
glorious world of tree and sky which surrounded 
me. I felt a thrill of wonder that I should be so 
placed. I had often lain thus under other trees, 
but never in such a mood as this. It was as if I 
had detached myself from the hitherto unbroken 
current of my personal life, and by some mira- 
cle of that marvelous place become part of the 
inarticulate life of Nature. Clouds and trees, dim 
vistas of shadow and flower-starred space of sun- 
light, were no longer alien to me ; I was akin with 
the vast and silent movement of things which 
encompassed me. No new sound came to me, no 
new sight broke on my vision ; but I heard with ears, 
and I saw with eyes, to which all other sounds and 
sights had ceased to be. I cannot translate into 
words the mystery and the thrill of that hour when, 
for the first time, I gave myself wholly into the 
keeping of Nature, and she received me as her child. 
What I felt, what I saw and heard, belong only to 
that place ; outside the Forest of Arden they are 


1 3 2 


UNDER THE TREES. 


incomprehensible. It is enough to say that I had 
parted with all my limitations, and freed myself 
from all my bonds of habit and ignorance and prej- 
udice ; I was no longer worn and spent with work 
and emotion and impression ; I was no longer 
prisoned within the iron bars of my own person- 
ality. I was as free as the bird ; I was as little 
bound to the past as the cloud that an hour ago 
was breathed out of the heart of the sea ; I was as 
joyous, as unconscious, as wholly given to the rapt- 
ure of the hour as if I had come into a world 
where freedom and joy were an inalienable and 
universal possession. I did not speculate about 
the great fleecy clouds that moved like galleons in 
the ethereal sea above me ; I simply felt their 
celestial beauty, the radiancy of their unchecked 
movement, the freedom and splendor of the inex- 
haustible play of life of which they were part. I 
asked no questions of myself about the great trees 
that wove the garments of the magical forest about 
me ; I felt the stir of their ancient life, rooted in 
the centuries that had left no record in that place 
save the added girth and the discarded leaf ; I had 
no thought about the bird whose note thrilled the 
forest save the rapture of pouring out without 
measure or thought the joy that was in me ; I felt 
the vast irresistible movement of life rolling, wave 
after wave, out of the unseen seas beyond, obliter- 
ating the faint divisions by which, in this working 
world, we count the days of our toil, and making 


IN THE FOREST OF ARDEN. 133 

all the ages one unbroken growth ; I felt the meas- 
ureless calm, the sublime repose, of that uninter- 
rupted expansion of form and beauty, from flower 
to star and from bird to cloud ; I felt the mighty 
impulse of that force which lights the sun in its 
track and sets the stars to mark the boundaries of 
its way. Unbroken repose, unlimited growth, in- 
exhaustible life, measureless force, unsearchable 
beauty — who shall feel these things and not know 
that there are no words for them ! And yet in 
Arden they are part of every man’s life ! 

And all the time Rosalind sat weaving her wild 
flowers into a loose wreath. 

“ I must not take them from this place,” she said, 
as she bound them about the venerable tree, as one 
would bind the fancy of the hour to some eternal 
truth. 

“ Yesterday,” she added, as she sat down again 
and shook the stray leaves and petals from her 
lap — “ yesterday was the first day of my life : to- 
day is the second.” 

It is one of the delights of Arden that one does 
not need to put his whole thought into words there ; 
half the need of language vanishes when we say 
only what we mean, and what we say is heard with 
sympathy and intelligence. Rosalind and I were 
thinking the same thought. Yesterday we had 
discovered that an open mind, freedom from work 
and care and turmoil, make it possible for people 
to be their true selves and to know each other. 


134 


UNDER THE TREES. 


To-day vve had discovered that nature reveals her- 
self only to the open mind and heart ; to all others 
she is deaf and dumb. The worldling who seeks 
her never sees so much as the hem of her garment ; 
the egotist, the self-engrossed man, searches in 
vain for her counsel and consolation ; the over- 
anxious, fretful soul finds her indifferent and 
incommunicable. We may seek her far and wide, 
with minds intent upon other things, and she will 
forever elude us ; but on the morning we open 
our windows with a free mind, she is there to break 
for us the seal of her treasures and to pour out the 
perfume of her flowers. She is cold, remote, inac- 
cessible only so long as we close the doors of our 
hearts and minds to her. With the drudges and 
slaves of mere getting and saving she has nothing 
in common ; but with those who hold their souls 
above the price of the world and the bribe of suc- 
cess she loves to share her repose, her strength, 
and her beauty. In Arden Rosalind and I cared 
as little for the world we had left as children intent 
upon daisies care for the dust of the road out of 
which they have come into the wide meadows. 


IN THE FOREST OF ARDEN. 


J 35 


VI. 

Here feel we but the penalty of Adam, 

The season’s difference, as the icy fang 
And churlish chiding of the winter wind, 

Which, when it bites and blows upon my body, 

Even till I shrink with cold, I smile and say, 

This is no flattery : these are counselors 
That feelingly persuade me what I am. 

If the ideal conditions of life, of which most of 
us dream, could be realized, the result would be a 
padded and luxurious existence, well-housed, well- 
fed, well-dressed, with all the winds of heaven tem- 
pered to indolence and cowardice. We are saved 
from absolute shame by the consciousness that if 
such a life were possible we should speedily revolt 
against the comforts that flattered the body while 
they ignored the soul. In Arden there is no such 
compromise with our immoral desires to get results 
without work, to buy without paying for what we 
receive. Nature keeps no running accounts and 
suffers no man to get in her debt ; she deals with 
us on the principles of immutable righteousness ; 
she treats us as her equals, and demands from us 
an equivalent for every gift or grace of sight or 
sound she bestows. She rejects contemptuously 
the advances of the weaklings who aspire to become 
her beneficiaries without having made good their 
claim by some service or self-denial ; she rewards 
those only who, like herself, find music in the tern- 


UNDER THE TREES. 


136 

pest as well as in the summer wind ; joy in arduous 
service as well as in careless ease. A world in 
which there were no labors to be accomplished, no 
burdens to be borne, no storms to be endured, 
would be a world without true joy, honest 
pleasure, or noble aspiration. It would be a 
fool’s paradise. 

The Forest of Arden is not without its changes 
of weather and season. Rosalind and I had fan- 
cied that it was always summer there, and that sun- 
light reigned from year’s end to year’s end ; if we 
had been told that storms sometimes overshadowed 
it, and that the icy fang of winter is felt there, we 
should have doubted the report. We had a good 
deal to learn when we first went to Arden ; in fact, 
we still have a great deal to learn about this won- 
derful country, in which so many of the ideals and 
standards with which we were once familiar are 
reversed. It is one of the blessed results of living 
in the Forest that one is more and more conscious 
that he does not know and more and more eager 
to learn. There are no shams of any sort in 
Arden, and all pride in concealing one’s ignorance 
disappears ; one’s chief concern is to be known 
precisely as he is. We were a little sensitive at 
first, a little disposed to be cautious about asking 
questions that might reveal our ignorance ; but 
we speedily lost the false shame we had brought 
with us from a world where men study to conceal, 
as a means of protecting, the things that are most 


IN THE FOREST OF ARDEN. 


137 


precious to them. When we learned that in the 
Forest nobody vulgarizes one’s affairs by making 
them matter of common talk, that all the mean- 
nesses of slander and gossip and misinterpretation 
are unknown, and that charity, courtesy, and 
honor are the unfailing law of intercourse, we 
threw down our reserves and experienced the re- 
freshing freedom and sympathy of full knowledge 
between man and man. 

After a long succession of golden days we awoke 
one morning to the familiar sound of rain on the 
roof ; there was no mistake about it ; it was raining 
in Arden ! Rosalind was so incredulous that I 
could see she doubted if she were awake ; and 
when she had satisfied herself of that fact she be- 
gan to ask herself whether we had been really in 
the Forest at all ; whether we had not been dream- 
ing in a kind of double consciousness, and had 
now come to the awakening which should rob us 
of this golden memory. At last we recognized the 
fact that we were still in Arden, and that it was 
raining. It was a melancholy awakening, and we 
were silent and depressed at breakfast ; for the 
first time no birds sang, and no sunlight flickered 
through the leaves and brought the day smiling to 
our very door. The rain fell steadily, and when 
the wind swept through the trees a sound like a 
sob went up from the Forest. After breakfast, for 
lack of active occupation, we lighted a few sticks 
in the rough fireplace, and found ourselves gradu- 


138 UNDER THE TREES. 

ally drawn into the circle of cheer in the little 
room. The great world of Nature was for a mo- 
ment out of doors, and there seemed no incongru- 
ity in talking about our own experiences ; we re- 
called the days in the world we had left behind ; 
we remembered the faces of our neighbors ; we 
reminded each other of the incidents of our jour- 
ney ; we retold, in antiphonal fashion, the story of 
our stay in the Forest ; we grew eloquent as we 
described, one after another, the noble persons we 
had met there ; our hearts kindled as we became 
conscious of the wonderful enrichment and en- 
largement of life that had come to us ; and as the 
varied splendors of the days and scenes of Arden 
returned in our memories, the spell of the Forest 
came upon us, and the mysterious cadence of the 
rain, falling from leaf to leaf, added another and 
deeper tone to the harmony of our Forest life. 
The gloom had gone ; we had all the delight of a 
new experience in our hearts. 

“I am glad it rains,” Rosalind said, as she gave 
the fire one of her vigorous stirrings ; “ I am glad 
it rains : I don’t think we should have realized 
how lovely it is here if we were not shut in from 
time to time. One is played upon by so many im- 
pressions that one must escape from them to under- 
stand how beautiful they are. And then I’m not 
sure that even dark days and rain have not some- 
thing which sunshine and clear skies could not 
give us.” As usual, Rosalind had spoken my 


IN THE FOREST OF ARDEN. 


139 


thought before I had made it quite clear to my- 
self ; I began to feel the peculiar delight of our 
comfort in the heart of that great forest when the 
storm was abroad. The monotone of the rain be- 
came rythmic with some ancient, primeval melody, 
which the woods sang before their solitude had 
been invaded by the eager feet of men always 
searching for something which they do not possess. 
I felt the spell of that mighty life which includes 
the tempest and the tumult of winds and waves 
among the myriad voices with which it speaks its 
marvelous secret. Half the meaning would go out 
of Nature if no storms ever dimmed the light of 
stars or vexed the calm of summer seas. It is the 
infinite variety of Nature which fits response to 
every need and mood, renews forever the freshness 
of contact with her, and holds us by a power of 
which we never weary because we never exhaust its 
resources. 

“ After all, Rosalind,” I said, “ it was not the 
storms and the cold which made our old life hard,* 
and gave Nature an unfriendly aspect; it was the 
things in our human experience which gave tem- 
pest and winter a meaning not their own. In a 
world in which all hearts beat true, and all hands 
were helpful, there would be no real hardship in 
Nature. It is the loss, sorrow, weariness, and dis- 
appointment of life which give dark days their 
gloom, and cold its icy edge, and work its bitter- 
ness. The real sorrows of life are not of Nature’s 


140 


UNDER THE TREES. 


making ; if faithlessness and treachery and every 
sort of baseness were taken out of human lives, we 
should find only a healthy and vigorous joy in such 
hardship as Nature imposes upon us. Upon men 
of sound, sweet life, she lays only such burdens as 
strength delights to carry, because in so doing it 
increases itself.” 

“That is true,” said Rosalind. “The day is 
dark only when the mind is dark ; all weathers are 
pleasant when the heart is at rest. There are rainy 
days in Arden, but no gloomy ones ; there are 
probably cold days, but none that chill the soul.” 

I do not know whether it was Rosalind’s smile or 
the sudden breaking of the sun through the clouds 
that made the room brilliant ; probably it was both. 
Rosalind opened the lattice, and I saw that the rain 
had ceased. The drops still hung on every leaf, 
but the clouds were breaking into great shining 
masses, and the blue of the sky was of unsearchable 
purity and depth. The sun poured a flood of light 
into the heart of the Forest, and suddenly every 
tiny drop, that a moment ago might have seemed a 
symbol of sorrow, held the radiant sun on its little 
disk, and every sphere shone as if a universe of 
fairy creation had been suddenly breathed into 
being. And the splendor touched Rosalind also. 


IN THE FOREST OF ARDEN . 


141 


VII. 

.... Pray you, if you know, 

Where in the purlieus of this forest stands 
A sheep-cote fenc’d about with olive trees ? 
***** 

The rank of osiers by the murmuring stream 
Left on your right hand, brings you to the place. 

But at this hour the house doth keep itself. 

Years ago, when we were planning to build a 
certain modest little house, Rosalind and I found 
endless delight in the pleasures of anticipation. 
By day and by night our talk came back to the 
home we were to make for ourselves. We dis- 
cussed plan after plan and found none quite to our 
mind ; we examined critically the houses we 
visited ; we pored over books ; we laid the ex- 
perience of our friends under contribution ; and 
when at last we had agreed upon certain essentials 
we called an architect to our aid, and fondly im- 
agined that now the prelude of discussion and 
delay was over, we should find unalloyed delight in 
seeing our imaginary home swiftly take form and 
become a thing of reality. Alas for our hopes ! 
Expense followed fast upon expense and delay 
upon delay. There were endless troubles with 
masons and carpenters and plumbers ; and when 
our dream was at last realized, the charm of it had 
somehow vanished ; so much anxiety, care, and 
vexation had gone into the process of building that 


142 


UNDER THE TREES. 


the completed structure seemed to be a monument 
of our toil rather than a refuge from the world. 

After this sad experience, Rosalind and I con- 
tented ourselves with building castles in Spain ; 
and so great has been our devotion to this occupa- 
tion that we are already joint owners of immense 
possessions in that remote and beautiful country. 
It is a singular circumstance that the dwellers in 
Arden, almost without exception, are holders of 
estates in Spain. I have never seen any of these 
splendid properties ; in fact, Rosalind and I have 
never seen our own castles ; but I have heard very 
full and graphic descriptions of those distant seats. 
In imagination I have often seen the great piles 
crowning the crests of wooded hills, whence noble 
parks and vast landscapes lay spread out ; I have 
been thrilled by the notes of the hunting-horn and 
discerned from afar the cavalcade of beautiful 
women and gallant men winding its way to the 
gates of the courtyard ; I have seen splendid ban- 
ners afloat from turret and casement ; I have seen 
lights flashing at night and heard faint murmurs of 
music and laughter. Truly they are fortunate who 
own castles in Spain ! 

In the Forest of Arden there is no such brave 
• show of battlement and rampart. In all our 
rambles we never came upon a castle or palace; in 
fact, so far as I remember, no one ever spoke of 
such structures. They seem to have no place 
there. Nor is it hard to understand this singular 


IN THE FOREST OF ARDEN. 


143 


divergence from the ways of a world whose habits 
and standards are continually reversed in the 
Forest. In castle and palace, the wealth and 
splendor of life, — everything that gives it grace 
and beauty to the eye, — are treasured within massive 
walls and protected from the common gaze and 
touch. Every great park, with its reaches of 
inviting sward and its groups of noble trees, seems 
to say to those who pass along the highway : “ We 
are too rare for your using.” Every stately 
palace, with its wonderful paintings and hangings, 
its sculpture and furnishings, locks its massive 
gates against the great world without, as if that 
which it guards were too precious for common 
eyes. In Arden no one dreams of fencing off a 
lovely bit of open meadow or a cluster of great 
trees ; private ownership is unknown in the Forest. 
Those who dwell there are tenants in common of a 
grander estate than was ever conquered by sword, 
purchased by gold, or bequeathed by the laws of 
descent. There are homes for privacy, for the 
sanctities of love and friendship ; but the wealth 
of life is common to all. Instead of elegant houses, 
and a meager, inferior public life, as in the great 
cities of the world, there are modest homes and a 
noble common life. If the houses in our cities 
were simple and home-like in their appointments, 
and all their treasures of art and beauty were 
lodged in noble structures, open to every citizen, 
the world would know something of the habits of 


r 44 


UNDER THE TREES. 


those who find in Arden that satisfying thought of 
life which is denied them among men. Modera- 
tion, simplicity, frugality for our private and per- 
sonal wants ; splendid profusion, noble lavishness, 
beautiful luxury for that common life which now 
languishes because so few recognize its needs. 
When will the world learn the real lesson of civili- 
zation, and, for the cheap and ignoble aspect of 
modern cities, bring back the stateliness of Rome 
and the beauty of that wonderful city whose poetry 
and art were but the voices of her common life ? 

The murmuring stream at our door in Arden 
whispered to us by day and by night the sweet 
secret of the happiness in the Forest, where no 
man strives to outshine his neighbor or to encum- 
ber the free and joyous play of his life with those 
luxuries which are only another name for care. 
Our modest little home sheltered but did not 
enslave us ; it held a door open for all the sweet 
ministries of affection, but it was barred against 
anxiety and care ; birds sang at its flower-em- 
bowered windows, and the fragrance of the beauti- 
ful days lingered there, but no sound from the 
world of those that strive and struggle ever entered. 
We were joyous as children in a home which pro- 
tected our bodies while it set our spirits at liberty ; 
which gave us the sweetness of rest and seclusion, 
while it left us free to use the ample leisure of the 
Forest and to drink deep of its rich and healthful 
life. Vine-covered, overshadowed by the pine, 


IN THE FOREST OF ARDEN . 


145 


with the olive standing in friendly neighborhood, 
our home in Arden seemed at the same time part 
of the Forest and part of ourselves. If it had 
grown out of the soil, it could not have fitted into 
the landscape with less suggestion of artifice and 
construction ; indeed, Nature had furnished all the 
materials, and when the simple structure was com- 
plete she claimed it again and made it her own 
with endless device of moss and vine. Without, it 
seemed part of the Forest ; within, it seemed the 
visible history of our life there. Friends came and 
went through the unlatched door ; morning broke 
radiant through the latticed window ; the seasons 
enfolded it with their changing life ; our own 
fellowship of mind and heart made it unspeakably 
sacred. Love and loyalty within ; noble friends at 
the hearthstone ; soft or shining heavens above ; 
mystery of forest and music of stream without : 
this is home in Arden. 


VIII. 

.... books in the running brooks. 

In the days before we went to Arden, Rosalind 
and I had often wondered what books we should 
find there, and we had anticipated with the keenest 
curiosity that in the mere presence or absence of 
certain books we should discover at last the final 
principle of criticism, the absolute standard of lit- 


146 


UNDER THE TREES. 


erary art. Many a time as we sat before the study 
fire and finished the reading of some volume that 
had yielded us unmixed delight, we had said to 
each other that we should surely find it in Arden, 
and read it again in an atmosphere in which the 
most delicate and beautiful meanings would be- 
come as clear as the exquisite tracery of frost 
on the study windows. That we should find all 
the classics there we had not the least doubt ; 
who could imagine a community of intelligent 
persons without Homer and Dante and Shake- 
speare and Wordsworth ! How the volumes 
would be housed we did not try to divine ; but 
that we should find them there we did not think 
of doubting. Our chief thought was of the prin- 
ciple of selection, long sought after by lovers 
of books but never yet found, which we were 
certain would be easily discovered when we came 
to look along the shelves of the libraries in Ar- 
den. With what delight we anticipated the long 
days when we should read together again, and 
amid such novel surroundings, the books we loved ! 
For, although our home contained few luxuries, it 
had fed the mind ; there was not a great soul in 
literature whose name was not on the shelves of 
our library, and the companionships of that room 
made our quiet home more rich in gracious and 
noble influences than many a palace. 

And yet we had been in the Forest several 
months before we even thought of books ; so 


IN THE FOREST OF ARDEN. 147 

absorbed were we in the noble life of the place, 
in the inspiring society about us. There came a 
morning, however, when, as I looked out into the 
shadows of the deep woods, I recalled a wonder- 
ful line of Dante’s that must have come to the 
poet as he passed through some silent and somber 
woodland path. Suddenly I remembered that 
months had passed since we had opened a book ; 
we whose most inspiring hours had once been 
those in which we read together from some familiar 
page. For an instant I felt something akin to re- 
morse ; it seemed as if I had been disloyal to 
friends who had never failed me in any time of 
need. But as I meditated on this strange for- 
getfulness of mine, I saw that in Arden books 
have no place and serve no purpose. Why should 
one read a translation when the original work lies 
open and legible before him * Why should one 
watch the reflections in the shadowy surface of 
the lake when the heavens shine above him ? 
Why should one linger before the picturesque 
landscape which art has imperfectly transferred to 
canvas when the scene, with all its elusive play 
of light and shade, lies outspread before him ? 
I became conscious that in Arden one lives ha- 
bitually in the world which books are always striv- 
ing to portray and interpret ; that one sees with 
his own eyes all that the eyes of the keenest ob- 
server have ever seen ; that one feels in his own 
soul all the greatest soul has ever felt. That 


148 


UNDER THE TREES. 


which in the outer world most men know only 
by report, in Arden each one knows for himself. 
The stories of travelers cease to interest us when 
we are at last within the borders of the strange, 
far country. 

Books are, at the best, faint and imperfect tran- 
scriptions of Nature and life ; when one comes to 
see Nature as she is with his own eyes, and to 
enter into the secrets of life, all transcriptions be- 
come inadequate. He who has heard the mysteri- 
ous and haunting monotone of the sea will never 
rest content with the noblest harmony in which the 
composer seeks to blend those deep, elusive tones ; 
he who has sat hour by hour under the spell of the 
deep woods will feel that spell shorn of its magical 
power in the noblest verse that ever sought to con- 
tain ari*d express it ; he who has once looked with 
clear, unflinching gaze into the depths of human 
life will find only vague shadows of the mighty 
realities in the greatest drama and fiction. The 
eternal struggle of art is to utter these unutterable 
things ; the immortal thirst of the soul will lead it 
again and again to these ancient fountains, whence 
it will bring back its handful of water in vessels 
curiously carven by the hands of imagination. But 
no cup of man’s making will ever hold all that 
fountain has to give, and to those who are really 
athirst these golden and beautifully wrought vessels 
are insufficient ; they must drink of the living 
stream. 


IN THE FOREST OF ARDEN. 


149 


In Arden we found these ancient and perennial 
fountains ; and we drank deep and long. There 
was that in the mystery of the woods which made 
all poetry seem pale and unreal to us ; there was 
that in life, as we saw it in the noble souls about 
us, which made all records and transcriptions in 
books seem cold and superficial. What need had 
we of verse when the things which the greatest 
poets had seen with vision no clearer than ours lay 
clear and unspeakably beautiful before us ? What 
had fiction or history for us, upon whom the thrill- 
ing spell of the deepest human living was laid ! 
Rosalind and I were hourly meeting those whose 
thoughts had fed the world for generations, and 
whose names were on all lips, but they never spoke 
of the books they had written, the pictures they 
had painted, the music they had composed. And, 
strange to say, it was not because of these splendid 
works that we were drawn to them ; it was the 
quality of their natures, the deep, compelling charm 
of their minds, which filled us with joy in their 
companionship. In Arden it is a small matter 
that Shakespeare has written “ Hamlet,” or Words- 
worth the “ Ode on Immortality ” ; not that 
which they have accomplished but that which they 
are in themselves gives these names a luster in 
Arden such as shines from no crown of fame in the 
outer world. Rosalind and I had dreamed that 
we might meet some of those whose words had 
been the food of immortal hope to us, but we al- 


UNDER THE TREES. 


* 5 ° 

most dreaded that nearer acquaintance which might 
dispel the illusion of superiority. How delighted 
were we to discover that not only are great souls, 
really understood, greater than all their works, 
but that the works were forgotten and nothing was 
remembered but the soul ! Not as those who are 
fed by the bounty of the king, but as kings our- 
selves, were we received into this noble company. 
Were we not born to the same inheritance ? Were 
not Nature and life ours as truly as they were 
Shakespeare’s and Wordsworth’s ? As we sat at 
rest under the great arms of the trees, or roamed 
at will through the woodland paths, the one thought 
that was common to us all was, not how nobly these 
scenes had been pictured and spoken, but how far 
above all language of art they were, and how shal- 
low runs the stream of speech when these mys- 
terious treasures of feeling and insight are launched 
upon it ! 


IX. 

.... every day 

Men of great worth resorted to this forest. 

The friendship of Nature is matched in Arden 
with human friendships, as sincere, as void of dis- 
guise and flattery, as stimulating and satisfying. 
There are times when every sensitive person is 
wounded by misunderstanding of motives, by lack 
of sympathy, by indifference and coldness ; such 


IN THE FOREST OF ARDEN. 15 1 

hours came not infrequently to Rosalind a*nd my- 
self in the old days before we set out for the Forest. 
We found unfailing consolation and strength in our 
common faith and purpose, but the frigidity of the 
atmosphere made us conscious at times of the effort 
one puts forth to simply sustain the life of his 
ideals, the charm and sweetness of those secret 
hopes which feed the soul. What must it be to live 
among those who are quick to recognize nobility of 
motive, to conspire with aspiration, to believe in 
the best and highest in each other ? It was to taste 
such a life as this, to feel the consoling power of 
mutual faith and the inspiration of a common de- 
votion to the ideals that were dearest to us, that 
our thoughts turned so often and with such long- 
ing to Arden. In such moments we opened with 
delight certain books which were full of the joy 
and beauty of the Forest life ; books which brought 
back the dreams that were fading out and touched 
us afresh with the unsearchable charm and beauty 
of the Ideal. Surely there could no better fortune 
befall us than to be able to call these great minis- 
tering spirits our friends. 

But, strong as was our longing, we were not 
without misgivings when we first found ourselves 
in Arden. In this commerce of ideas and hopes, 
what had we to give in exchange ? How could we 
claim that equality with those we longed to know 
which is the only basis of friendship ? We were 
unconsciously carrying into the Forest the limi- 


J 5 2 


UNDER THE TREES. 


tations of our old life, and among all the glad sur- 
prises that awaited us, there was none so joyful as 
the discovery that our misgivings vanished as soon 
as we began to know our neighbors. Neither of 
us will ever forget the perfect joy of those earliest 
meetings ; a joy so great that we wondered if it 
could endure. There is nothing so satisfying as 
quick comprehension of one’s hopes, instant sym- 
pathy with them, absolute frankness of speech, and 
the brilliant and stimulating play of mind upon 
mind where there is complete unconsciousness of 
self and complete absorption in the idea and the 
hour. There was something almost intoxicating 
in those first wonderful talks in Arden ; we seemed 
suddenly not only to be perfectly understood by 
others, but for the first time to understand our- 
selves ; the horizons of our mental world seemed 
to be swiftly receding and new continents of truth 
were lifted up into the clear light of consciousness. 
All that was best in us was set free ; we were con- 
fident where we had been uncertain and doubtful ; 
we were bold where we had been almost cowardly. 
We spoke our deepest thought frankly ; we drew 
from their hiding-places our noblest dreams of the 
life we hoped to live and the things we hoped to 
achieve ; we concealed nothing, reserved nothing, 
evaded nothing ; we were desirous above all things 
that others should know us as we knew ourselves. 
It was especially restful and refreshing to speak of 
our failures and weaknesses, of our struggles and 


IN THE FOREST OF ARDEN. 


153 


defeats ; for these experiences of ours were in- 
stantly matched by kindred experiences, and in the 
common sympathy and comprehension a new kind 
of strength came to us. The humiliation of defeat 
was shared, we found, by even the greatest ; and 
that which made these noble souls what they were 
was not freedom from failure and weakness, but 
steadfast struggle to overcome and achieve. As 
the life of a new hope filled our hearts, we remem- 
bered with a sudden pain the world out of which 
we had escaped, where every one hides his weak- 
ness lest it feed a vulgar curiosity, and conceals his 
defeats lest they be used to destroy rather than to 
build him up. 

With what delight did we find that in Arden the 
talk touched only great themes, in a spirit of beauti- 
ful candor and unaffected earnestness ! To have 
exchanged the small personal talk from which we 
had often been unable to escape for this simple, 
sincere discourse on the things that were of 
common interest was like exchanging the cloud-en- 
veloped lowland for some sunny mountain slope, 
where every breath was vital and one mused on half 
a continent spread out at his feet. There is no 
food for the soul but truth, and we were filled with 
a mighty hunger when we understood for how long 
a time we had been but half fed. A new strength 
came to us, and with it an openness of mind and a 
responsiveness of heart that made life an inexhaust- 
ible joy. We were set free from the weariness of 


154 


UNDER THE TREES. 


old struggles to make ourselves understood ; we 
were no longer perplexed with doubts about the 
reality of our ideas ; we had but to speak the 
thought that was in us, and to live fearlessly and 
joyously in the hour that was before us. Frank 
speaking, absolute candor, that would once have 
wounded, now only cheered and stimulated ; the 
spirit of entire helpfulness drives out all morbid 
self-consciousness. Differences no longer embitter 
when courtesy and faith are universal possessions. 

There is nothing more sacred than friendship, 
and it is impossible to profane it by drawing the 
veil from its ministries. The charm of a perfectly 
noble companionship between two souls is as real 
as the perfume of a flower, and as impossible to 
convey by word or speech ; Nature has made its 
sanctity inviolable by making it forever impossible 
of revelation and transference. I cannot translate 
into any language the delicate charm, the inexhaust- 
ible variety, the noble fidelity to truth, the vigor and 
splendor of thought, the unfailing sympathy, of our 
Arden friendships ; they are a part of the Forest, 
and one must seek them there. It would vulgarize 
these fellowships to catalogue the great names, 
always familiar to us, and yet which gained another 
and a better familiarity when they ceased to recall 
famous persons and became associated with those 
who sat at our hearthstone or gathered about our 
simple board. Rosalind was sooner at home in this 
noble company than I : she had far less to learn ; 


IN THE FOREST OF ARDEN. 


T 55 


but at last I grew into a familiarity with my neigh- 
bors which was all the sweeter to me because it 
registered a change in myself long hoped for, often 
despaired of, at last accomplished. To be at one 
with Nature was a joy which made life seem rich 
beyond all earlier thought ; but when to this there 
was added the fellowship of spirits as true and 
great as Nature herself, the wine of life overflowed 
the exquisite cup into which an invisible hand 
poured it. The days passed like a dream as we 
strayed together through the woodland paths ; 
sometimes in some deep and shadowy glen silence 
laid her finger on our lips, and in a common mood 
we found ourselves drawn together without speech. 
Often at night, when the magic of the moon has 
woven all manner of enchantments about us, we 
have lingered hour after hour under that supreme 
spell which is felt only when soul speaks with soul. 


x. 


.... there’s no clock in the forest. 

There were a great many days in Arden when 
we did absolutely nothing ; we awoke without 
plans ; we fell asleep without memories. This was 
especially true of the earlier part of our stay in the 
Forest ; the stage of intense enjoyment of new- 
found freedom and repose. There was a kind of 
rapture in the possession of our days that was new 


UNDER THE TREES. 


156 

to us ; a sense of ownership of time of which we 
had never so much as dreamed when we lived by 
the clock. Those tiny ornamental hands on the 
delicately painted dial were our taskmasters, dis- 
guised under forms so dainty and fragile that, while 
we felt their tyranny, we never so much as sus- 
pected their share in our servitude. Silent them- 
selves, they issued their commands in tones we 
dared not disregard ; fashioned so cunningly, they 
ruled us as with iron scepters ; moving within so 
small a circle, they sent us hither and yon on every 
imaginable service. They severed eternity into 
minute fragments, and dealt it out to us minute by 
minute like a cordial given drop by drop to the 
dying ; they marked with relentless exactness the 
brief periods of our leisure and indicated the hours 
of our toil. We could not escape from their vigi- 
lant and inexorable surveillance ; day and night 
they kept silent record beside us, measuring out 
the golden light of summer in their tiny balances, 
and doling out the pittance of winter sunshine with 
niggardly reluctance. They hastened to the end of 
our joys, and moved with funereal slowness through 
the appointed times of our sorrow. They ruled 
every season, pervaded every day, recorded every 
hour, and, like misers hoarding a treasure, doled 
out our birthright of leisure second by second ; so 
that, being rich, we were always impoverished ; 
inheritors of vast fortune, we were put off with a 
meager income ; born free, we were servants of 


IN THE FOREST OF ARDEN. 157 

masters who neither ate nor slept, that they might 
never for a second surrender their overseership. 

There are no clocks in Arden ; the sun bestows 
the day, and no impertinence of men destroys its 
charm by calculating its value and marking it with 
a price. The only computers of time are the great 
trees whose shadows register the unbroken march 
of light from east to west. Even the days and 
nights lost that painful distinctness which they had 
for us when they gave us a constant sense of loss, 
an incessant apprehension of change and age. Their 
shining procession leaves no such records in Arden ; 
they come like the waves whose ceaseless flow sings 
of the boundless sea whence they come. They 
bring no consciousness of ebbing years and joys 
and strength ; they bring rather a sense of eternal 
resource and beneficence. In Arden one. never 
feels in haste ; there is always time enough and to 
spare ; in fact, the word time is never used in the 
vernacular of the Forest except when reference is 
made to the enslaved world without. There were 
moments at the beginning when we felt a little 
bewildered by our freedom, and I think Rosalind 
secretly longed for the familiar tones of the cuckoo 
clock which had chimed so many years in and out 
for us in the old days. One must get accustomed 
even to good fortune, and after one has been con- 
fined within the narrow limits of a little plot of 
earth the possession of a continent confuses and 
perplexes. But men are born to good fortune if 


UNDER THE TREES. 


* 5 » 

they but knew it, and we were soon reconciled to 
the possession of inexhaustible wealth. We felt 
the delight of a sudden exchange of poverty for 
richness, a swift transition from bondage to free- 
dom. Eternity was ours, and we ceased to divide 
it into fragments, or to set it off into duties and 
work. We lived in the consciousness of a vast 
leisure ; a quiet happiness took the place of the old 
anxiety to always do at the moment the thing 
that ought to be done ; we accepted the days as 
gifts of joy rather than as bringers of care. 

It was delightful to fall asleep lulled by the rustle 
of the leaves, and to awake, without memory of 
care or pressure of work, to a day that had brought 
nothing more discordant into the Forest than the 
singing of birds. We rose exhilarated and buoy- 
ant, and breakfasted merrily under a great oak ; 
sometimes we lingered far on into the morning, 
yielding ourselves to the spell of the early day 
when it no longer proses of work and duty, but 
sings of freedom and ease and the strength that 
makes a play of life. Often we strayed without 
plan or purpose, as the winding paths of the Forest 
led us ; happy and care-free as children suddenly 
let loose in fairyland. We discovered moss-grown 
paths which led into the very heart of the Forest, 
and we pressed on silently from one green recess to 
another until all memory of the sunnier world faded 
out of mind. Sometimes we emerged suddenly 
into a wide, brilliant glade ; sometimes we came into 


IN THE FOREST OF ARDEN. 


159 


a sanctuary so overhung with great masses of 
foliage, so secluded and silent, that we took the 
rude pile of moss-grown stones we found there as 
an altar to solitude, and our stillness became part 
of the universal worship of silence which touched 
us with a deep and beautiful solemnity. Wherever 
we strayed the same tranquil leisure enfolded us ; 
day followed day in an order unbroken and peace- 
ful as the unfolding of the flowers and the silent 
march of the stars. Time no longer ran like the 
few sands in a delicate hour-glass held by a fragile 
human hand, but like a majestic river fed by fath- 
omless seas. The sky, bare and free from horizon 
to horizon, was itself a symbol of eternity, with its 
infinite depth of color, its sublime serenity, its deep 
silence broken only by the flight and songs of birds. 
These were at home in that ethereal sphere, at rest 
in that boundless space, and we were not slow to 
learn the lesson of their freedom and joy. We gave 
ourselves up to the sweetness of that unmeasured 
life, without thought of yesterday or to-morrow ; 
we drank the cup which to-day held to our lips, and 
knew that so long as we were athirst that draught 
would not be denied us. 


l6o 


UNDER THE TREES. 


XI. 


.... every of this happy number 
That have endur’d shrewd nights and days with us. 

Shall share the good of our returned fortune, 

According to the measure of their states. 

There is this great consolation for those who 
cannot live continually in the Forest of Arden : 
that, having once proven one’s citizenship there, 
one can return at will. Those who have lived in 
Arden and have gone back again into the world, 
are sustained in their loneliness by the knowledge 
of their fellowship with a nobler community. 
Aliens though they are, they have yet a country to 
which they are loyal, not through interest, but 
through aspiration, imagination, faith, and love. 
Rosalind and I found the months in Arden all too 
brief ; our life there was one long golden day, 
whose sunset cast a soft and tender light on our 
whole past and made it beautiful for us. It is one 
of the delights of the Forest that only the noblest 
aspects of life are visible there ; or, rather, that 
the hard and bare details of living, seen in the 
atmosphere of Arden, yield some truth of character 
or experience which, like the rose, makes even the 
rough calyx which encased it beautiful. We had 
sometimes spoken together of our return to the 
world we had left, but we put off as long as possible 
all definite preparations. I am not sure that I 
should ever have come back if Rosalind had not 


IN THE FOREST OF ARDEN. 161 

taken the matter into her own hands. She remem- 
bered that there was work to be done which ought 
not to be longer postponed ; that there were duties 
to be met which ought not to be longer evaded ; 
and when did Rosalind fail to be or to do that 
which the hour and the experience commanded? 
We treasured the last days as if the minutes were 
pure gold ; we lingered in talk with our friends as 
if we should never again hear such spoken words ; 
we loitered in the woods as if the spell of that beau- 
tiful silence would never again touch us. And yet 
we knew that, once possessed, these things were 
ours forever ; neither care, nor change, nor time, 
nor death, could take them from us, for henceforth 
they were part of ourselves. 

We stood again at length on the little porch, 
covered with dust, and turned the key in the unused 
lock. I think we were both a little reluctant to 
enter and begin again the old round of life and 
work. The house seemed smaller and less home- 
like, the furniture had lost its freshness, the books 
on the shelves looked dull and faded. Rosalind 
ran to a window, opened it, and let in a flood of 
sunshine. I confess I was beginning to feel a little 
heartsick, but when the light fell on her I remem- 
bered the rainy day in Arden, when the first rays 
after the storm touched her and dispelled the 
gloom, and I realized, with a joy too deep for words 
or tears, that I had brought the best of Arden with 
me. We talked little during those first days of our 


162 


UNDER THE TREES. 


home-coming, but we set the house in order, we re- 
called to the lonely rooms the-old associations, and 
we quietly took up the cares and burdens we had 
dropped. It was not easy at first, and there were 
days when we were both heartsore ; but we waited 
and worked and hoped. Our neighbors found us 
more silent and absorbed than of old, but neither 
that change nor our absence seemed to have made 
any impression upon them. Indeed, we even 
doubted if they knew that we had taken such a jour- 
ney. Day by day we stepped into the old places and 
fell into the old habits, until all the broken threads 
of our life were reunited and we were apparently 
as much a part of the world as if we had never gone 
out of it and found a nobler and happier sphere. 

But there came to us gradually a clear conscious- 
ness that, though we were in the world, we were 
not of it, nor ever again could be. It was no longer 
our world ; its standards, its thoughts, its pleasures, 
were not for us. We were not lonely in it ; on the 
contrary, when the first impression of strangeness 
wore off, we were happier than we had ever been in 
the old days. Our reputation was no longer in the 
breath of men ; our fortune was no longer at the 
mercy of rising or falling markets ; our plans and 
hopes were no longer subject to chance and change. 
We had a possession in the Forest of Arden, and 
we had friends and dreams there beyond the em- 
pire of time and fate. And when we compared the 
security of our fortunes with the vicissitudes to 


IN THE FOREST OF ARDEN. 163 

which the estates of our neighbors were exposed ; 
when we compared our noble-hearted friends with 
their meaner companionships ; when we compared 
the peaceful serenity of our hearts with their per- 
plexities and anxieties, we were filled with inexpress- 
ible sympathy. We no longer pierced them with 
the arrows of satire and wit because they accepted 
lower standards and found pleasure in things essen- 
tially pleasureless ; they had not lived in Arden, 
and why should we berate them for not possessing 
that which had never been within their reach ? We 
saw that upon those whom an inscrutable fate has 
led through the paths of Arden a great and noble 
duty is laid. They are not to be the scorners and 
despisers of those whose eyes are holden that they 
cannot see, and whose ears are stopped that they 
cannot hear, the vision and the melody of things 
ideal. They are rather to be eyes to the blind and 
ears to the deaf. They are to interpret in unshaken 
trust and patience that which has been revealed to 
them ; servants are they of the Ideal, and their 
ministry is their exceeding great reward. So long 
as they see clearly, it is small matter to them that 
their message is rejected, the mighty consolation 
which they bring refused ; their joy does not hang 
on acceptance or rejection at the hands of their fel- 
lows. The only real losers are those who will not 
see nor hear. It is not the light-bringer who suffers 
when the torch is torn from his hands ; it is those 
whose paths he would lighten. 


164 


UNDER THE TREES. 


And more and more, as the days went by, Rosa- 
lind and I found the life of the Forest stealing into 
our old home. The old monotony was gone ; the 
old weariness and depression crossed our threshold 
no more. If work was pressing, we were always 
looking through and beyond it ; we saw the fine 
results that were being accomplished in it ; we rec- 
ognized the high necessity which imposed it. If 
perplexities and cares sat with us at the fireside, we 
received them as friends ; for in the light of Arden 
had we not seen their harsh masks removed, and 
behind them the benignant faces of those who 
patiently serve and minister, and receive no reward 
save fear and avoidance and misconception ? In 
fact, having lived in Arden, and with the conscious- 
ness that we might seek shelter there as in another 
and securer home, the world barely touched us, save 
to awaken our sympathies and to evoke our help. 
It had little to give us ; we had much to give it. 
There was within and about us a peace and joy 
which were not for us alone. Our little home was 
folded within impalpable walls, and beyond it lay a 
vision of green foliage and golden masses of cloud 
that never faded off the horizon. There were be* 
nignant presences in our rooms visible to no eyes 
but ours ; for our Arden friends did not forsake 
us. There were memories between us which made 
all our days beautiful with the consciousness of 
immortal faith and love ; there were hopes which, 
like celestial beings, looked upon us with eyes deep 


IN THE FOREST OF ARDEN. 165 

with unspeakable prophecy as they waited at the 
doors of the future. 

It is an autumn afternoon, and the sun lies warm 
on the ripening vines that cover the wall, and on 
the late flowers that bloom by the roadside. As I 
write these words I look up from my portfolio, and 
Rosalind sits there, work in hand, smiling at me 
over her flying needle. My glance rests on her a 
moment, and a strange uncertainty comes over me. 
Have I really been in Arden, or have I dreamed 
these things, looking into Rosalind’s eyes ? It mat- 
ters little whether I have traveled or dreamed ; 
where Rosalind is, there, for me at least, lies the 
Forest of Arden. 



AN UNDISCOVERED ISLAND 


‘ * Where should this music be ? i’ the air, or th’ earth ? 
It sounds no more : and, sure, it waits upon 
Some god o’ the island.” 



CHAPTER XXI. 


AN UNDISCOVERED ISLAND. 

I. 

Come unto these yellow sands, 

And then take hands ; 

Curtsied when you have, and kiss’d 
The wild waves whist, 

Foot it featly here and there ; 

And, sweet sprites, the burden bear. 

One winter evening, some time after the mem- 
orable year of our first visit to the Forest of Arden, 
Rosalind and I were planning a return to that en- 
chanting place, and in the glow of the fire on the 
hearth were picturing to ourselves the delights that 
would be ours again, when the clang of the knocker 
suddenly recalled us from our dreams. Hospitably 
inclined, as I trust and believe we are, at that 
moment an interruption seemed like an intrusion. 
But our momentary annoyance was speedily dis- 
pelled when the library door opened, and, with the 
freedom which belongs to old friendship, the Poet 
entered unannounced. No one could have been 
more welcome on that wintry night than this genial 
and human soul, bound to us by many ties of 

169 


170 


UNDER THE TREES. 


familiar association as well as by frequent neighbor- 
liness in the woods of Arden. It had happened 
again and again that we had found ourselves to- 
gether in the recesses of the Forest, and enchanting 
beyond all speech had been those days and nights 
of mingled talk and dreams. 

The Poet is one of the friends whose coming is 
peculiarly welcome because it always harmonizes 
with the mood of the moment, and no speech is 
needed to bring us into agreement. Rosalind took 
the visitor into our plan at once, and urged him to 
go with us on this mysterious journey ; whereupon 
he told us that, by one of those delightful coinci- 
dences which are always happening to people of 
kindred tastes and aims, this very errand had 
brought him to our door. The time had come, he 
said, when he could no longer resist the longing for 
Arden ! We all smiled at that sudden outburst ; 
how well we knew what it meant ! After months of 
going our ways dutifully in the dust and heat of the 
world, the longing for Arden would on the instant 
become irresistible. Come what might, the hunger 
for perfect comprehension and fellowship, the thirst 
for the beauty and repose of the deep woods, must 
be satisfied, and forsaking whatever was in hand we 
fled incontinently across the invisible boundaries 
into that other and diviner country. No sooner had 
the Poet made his confession than we hastened to 
make ours, and, without further consideration, we 
resolved the very next day to shake the dust from 


AN UNDISCOVERED ISLAND. 17 1 

our feet and escape into Arden. This question 
settled, a great gayety seized us, and we began to 
plan new journeys for the years to come ; journeys 
which had this peculiar charm — that they belonged 
to a few kindred spirits ; the world knows nothing 
of them, and when some obscure reference brings 
them to mind, smiles its skeptical smile, and goes 
on with its money-getting. Rosalind drew from its 
hiding-place the chart of this world of the imagina- 
tion which we were given to studying on long win- 
ter evenings, and of which only a few copies exist. 
These charts are among the few things not to be 
had for money ; if they fall into alien hands they 
are incomprehensible. It is true of them, as of the 
books which describe the Forest of Arden, that they 
have a kind of second meaning, only to be dis- 
cerned by those whose eyes detect the deeper things 
of life. It is another peculiarity of these charts 
that while science has indirectly done not a little 
for their completeness, the work of preparing them 
has fallen entirely into the hands of the poets ; not, 
of course, the writers of verse alone, but those who 
have had the vision of the great world as it lies in 
the imagination, and who have heard that deep 
and incommunicable music which sings at the heart 
of it. 

Rosalind spread this chart on the table, and we 
drew our chairs around it, noting now one and now 
another of the famous places of which all men 
have heard, but which to most men are mere fig- 


172 


UNDER THE TREES. 


ments of dreams. Here, for instance, in a certain 
latitude plainly marked on the margin, is that calm 
sweet land of the Phseacians where reigns Alcinotis 
the great-souled king, and the white-armed Nau- 
sicaa sings after her bath on the river’s brink : 

Without the palace court and near the gate 
A spacious garden of four acres lay ; 

A hedge inclosed it round, and lofty trees 
Flourished in generous growth within — the pear 
And the pomegranate, and the apple tree 
With its fair fruitage, and the luscious fig, 

And olive always green. The fruit they bear 
Falls not, nor ever fails in winter time 
Nor summer, but is yielded all the year. 

The ever-blowing west wind causes some 
To swell and some to ripen ; pear succeeds 
To pear ; to apple, apple, grape to grape, 

Fig ripens after fig. 

Here, as Rosalind moves her finger, lies the 
valley of Avalon, whither Arthur went to heal his 
overmastering sorrow, and where the air is always 
sweet with the smell of apple blossoms. In this 
deep wood lives Merlin, still weaving, as of old, the 
magic spells. There is the castle of the Grail, 
and as our eyes fall on it, suddenly there comes a 
hush, and we seem to hear the sublime antiphony, 
choir answering choir in heavenly melody, as 
Parsifal raises the cup, and the light from above 
smites it into sudden glory. We are traveling 
eastward, touching here and there those names 
which belong only to the greatest poetry, when Rosa- 


AN UNDISCOVERED ISLAND. 


173 


lind’s finger — the index of our wanderings — sud- 
denly pauses and rests on an island, not large, as it 
lies amid that silent sea, but wonderful above all 
islands to which thought has ever wandered or where 
imagination has ever made its home. Under the light 
of the lamp, with Rosalind’s face bending over it, 
no island ever slept in a deeper calm than this little 
circle of land about which the greatest of the poets 
once evoked the most marvelous of tempests. 
Rosalind’s finger does not move from that magical 
point, and, peering on the chart, our eyes suddenly 
meet, and a single thought is in them all. Why 
not postpone Arden for the moment and explore 
the isle of Miranda’s morning beauty and Pros- 
pero’s magical wisdom ? 

“Why not?” says Rosalind, speaking aloud, and 
instead of answering her question the Poet and I 
are wondering why we have never gone before. 
Straightway we fall to studying the map more 
closely ; we note the latitude and longitude ; it is 
but a little way from the mainland where stretches 
the green expanse of the Forest of Arden. We 
might have gone long ago if we had been a little 
more adventurous ; at least we think we might at 
the first blush ; but when we talk it over, as we 
proceed to do when Rosalind has rolled up the chart 
and put it in its place, we are not quite so sure 
about it. It is one of the singular things about this 
kind of journeying that one learns how to travel 
and where to go only by personal observation. Be- 


174 


UNDER THE TREES. 


fore we went to Arden, for instance, we had no 
clear knowledge of any of these countries ; we had 
often heard of them ; their names were often on 
our lips ; but they were not real to us. That happy 
day when Arden ceased to be a dream to us was 
the beginning of a rapid growth of knowledge con- 
cerning these invisible countries ; one by one they 
seemed to rise within the circle of our expanding 
experience until we became aware that we were 
masters of a new kind of geography. That delight- 
ful discovery was not many years behind us, but 
this new knowledge had already become so much a 
part of our lives that we often confused it with the 
knowledge of commoner things. 

That night, before we parted, our plans were com- 
pleted ; on the morrow, when night came, the fire 
on the hearth would be unlighted, for we should be 
on Prospero’s island. 


ii. 


O, rejoice 

Beyond a common joy ; and set it down 
With gold on lasting pillars : in one voyage 
Did Claribel her husband find at Tunis ; 

And Ferdinand, her brother, found a wife 
Where he himself was lost; Prospero, his dukedom, 

In a poor isle; and all of us, ourselves, 

Where no man was his own. 

“ Honest Gonzalo never spoke truer word,” said 


AN UNDISCOVERED ISLAND. 


175 


the Poet, answering Rosalind, who had been quot- 
ing the old counselor’s summing up of the common 
good fortune on the island when Prospero dispelled 
his enchantments arid the shipwrecked company- 
found themselves saved as by miracle. It was our 
first evening on the island ; one of those memorable 
nights when all things seem born anew into some 
larger heritage of beauty. The moon hung low 
over the quiet sea, sleeping now under the spell of 
the summer night, as if no storm had ever vexed it. 
So silent, so hushed was it that but for the soft rip- 
ple on the sand we should have thought it calmed 
in eternal repose. Far off along the horizon the 
stars hung motionless as the sea ; overhead they 
shone out of the measureless depths of space with 
a soft and solemn splendor. Not a branch moved 
on the great trees behind us, folded now in the 
universal mystery of the night. The little stretch 
of beach, over whose yellow sands the song of the 
invisible Ariel once floated, lay in the soft light fit 
for the feet of fairies, or the gentle advance and re- 
treat of the sea. The very air, suffused through all 
that vast immensity with a mysterious light, seemed 
like a dream of peace. 

In such a place, at such a-n hour, one shrinks 
from speech as from the word that breaks the spell. 
When one is so much a part of the sublime order of 
things that the universal movement of force that 
streams through all things embraces and thrills him 
with the consciousness of common fellowship, how 


IJ6 


UNDER THE TREES. 


vain is all human utterance ! The greatest of 
poems, the sublime harmony in which all things are 
folded, has never been spoken, and never will be. 
No lyre in any human hand will ever make those 
divine chords audible. The poets hear them, know 
them, live by them ; but no verse contains them. 
So much a part of that wondrous night were we that 
any speech would have seemed like a severance of 
things that were one ; all the deep meaning of the 
hour was clear to us because we were included in it. 
How long we sat in that silence I do not know ; we 
had forgotten the world out of which we had 
escaped, and the route by which we came ; we 
knew only that an infinite sea of beauty and wonder 
rippled on the beach at our feet, and that over us 
the heavens were as a delicate veil, beyond which 
diviner loveliness seemed waiting on the verge of 
birth. 

It was Rosalind who spoke at last, and spoke in 
words which flashed the human truth of the hour 
into our thoughts. On this island we had found 
ourselves ; so often lost, at times so long forgotten, 
in the busy world that lay afar off. And then we 
fell a-talking of the island and of all the kindred 
places where men have found homes for their souls ; 
sweet and fragrant retreats whence the noise of 
strife and toil died into a faint murmur, or was lost 
in some vast silence. At Milan, Prospero found the 
cares of state so irksome, the joy of “ secret 
studies ” so alluring, that, despairing of harmoniz- 


AN UNDISCOVERED ISLAND. 


177 


ing things so alien, he took refuge with his books, 
and found his “ library was dukedom large enough.” 
But the problem was not solved by this surrender ; 
out of the library, as out of the dukedom, he was set 
adrift, homeless and friendless, until he set foot on 
the island where he was to rule with no divided 
sway. Here was his true home ; here the spirits of 
the air and the powers of the earth were his minis- 
ters ; here his word seemed part of the elemental 
order ; he spoke and it was done, for the winds and 
the sea obeyed him. And when, in the working 
out of destiny which he himself directed, he returns 
to the dukedom from which he had been thrust out, 
he is no longer the Prospero of ineffective days. 
Henceforth he will rule Milan as he rules the quiet 
dukedom of his books ; he has become a master of 
life and time, and his sovereignty will never again 
be disputed. 

Prospero did not find the island ; he created it. 
It was the necessity of his life that he should fash- 
ion this bit of territory out of the great sea, that 
here his soul might learn its strength and win its 
freedom ; that here, far from dukedom and cour- 
tiers, he might discover that a great soul creates its 
own world and lives its own life. Milan may cast 
him out, as did Florence another of his kind, but 
this human rejection will but bring him into that 
empire which no enmity may touch, in the calm of 
whose divinely ordered government treasons are un- 
known. No man finds himself until he has created 


i 7 8 


UNDER THE TREES. 


a world for his own soul ; a world apart from care 
and weakness and the confusions of strife, in which 
the faiths that inspire him and the ideals that lead 
him are the great and lasting verities. To this 
world-building all the great poetic minds are driven; 
within this invisible empire alone can they rec- 
oncile the life that surrounds them with the life 
that floats like a dream before them. No great 
mind is ever at rest until in some way the Real and 
the Ideal are found to be one. Literature is full of 
these beautiful homes of the soul, reared without 
the sound of chisel or hammer by the magic of the 
Imagination — divinest of the faculties, since it is 
the only one which creates. The other faculties 
observe, record, compare, combine ; the imagina- 
tion alone uses the brush, the chisel, or the pen ! 

If one were to record these kingdoms of the 
mind, how long and luminous would be the cata- 
logue ! The golden age and the fabled Atlantis of 
the elder poets ; the “ Republic ” of the broad- 
browed Athenian ; the secret gardens, impregnable 
castles, sweet and inaccessible retreats of the medi- 
aeval fancy ; the Paradise of Dante ; the enchant- 
ing world through which the Fairy Queen moves ; 
the “Utopia” of the noble More; the Forest of 
Arden — what visions of peace, what glimpses of 
beauty, accompany every name ! To all these 
worlds of supernal loveliness there is a single key ; 
fortunate among men are they who hold it ! 


AN UNDISCOVERED ISLAND. 


179 


III. 

Be not afraid ; the isle is full of noises, 

Sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not. 
Sometimes a thousand twanging instruments 
Will hum about mine ears ; and sometimes voices, 

That, if I then had waked after long sleep, 

Will make me sleep again ; and then, in dreaming, 

The clouds methought would open, and show riches 
Ready to drop upon me ; that, when I waked, 

I cried to dream again. 

When the sun rose the next morning, we rose 
with it, eager to explore our little world about which 
the sea never ceased to sing its mighty hymn of 
solitude and mystery. There was something im- 
pressive in the consciousness of our isolation ; be- 
tween us and any noise of human occupation the 
waters were stretched as a barrier against which all 
sound died into silence. There was something 
enchanting in the beauty and strangeness of this 
tiny continent, unreported by any geography, un- 
marked on any chart save that which a few possess 
as a kind of sacred heritage, untraveled as yet by our 
eager feet. There was something thrilling in the 
associations that touched the island with such a light 
as never fell from sun or star. With beating hearts 
we set out on that wondrous exploration. Who 
does not remember the thrill of the first discovery 
of a new world ; that joy of the soul in possession 
of a great new truth which passes all speech ? 


i8o 


UNDER THE TREES. 


There are hours in this troubled life when the mists 
are lifted and float away like faint clouds against 
the blue, and the great world lies like a splendid 
vision before us, and “ the immeasurable heavens 
break open to the highest,” and in a sudden rift of 
human limitation the whole sublime order opens 
before us, sings to us out of the fathomless depths 
of its harmony, thrills us with a sudden sense of 
God and of the undiscovered range and splendor 
of our lives ; and when they have passed, these 
hours remain with us in the afterglow of clearer 
vision and deeper faith. Such hours are the pecu- 
liar joy of those who hold the key of the imagina- 
tion in their grasp and are able to unlock the gate 
of dreams, or make themselves the companion of 
the great explorers in the realms of truth and beauty. 
These are the secret joys which people solitude and 
make the quiet days one long draught of inspiration. 

In such a mood our quest began and ended. We 
skirted the beach ; we plunged deep into the re- 
cesses of the woods ; we stretched ourselves on the 
broad expanse of greensward in the shade of the 
great boughs ; we followed the rivulet to the hushed 
and shadowy solitude where it issued from the moss- 
grown rock ; wherever we bent our steps the song 
of the sea followed us, and the day was calm and 
cool as with its breadth and freshness. The island 
had its own beauty ; the beauty of virgin forests 
and untrodden paths, of a certain fragrant sweet- 
ness gathered in years of untroubled solitude, of a 


AN UNDISCOVERED ISLAND. iSl 

certain pastoral repose such as comes to Nature 
when man is remote ; but that which gave us the 
thrill of something strangely sweet and satisfying, 
something apart from the world we had left, was 
not anything we saw with eye. All that was visible 
was beautiful, but it was a loveliness not unfamiliar ; 
it was the invisible continually breaking in upon our 
consciousness that laid us under a spell. We were 
conscious of something lovelier than we saw ; a 
world not to be discerned by sight, but real and 
unspeakably beautiful to the soul. Even to Caliban 
the isle was “full of noises”; “sounds and sweet 
airs that give delight” did not escape his brutish 
sense. Sometimes “ a thousand twangling instru- 
ments ” hummed about his ears ; sometimes voices 
whose soft music was akin to sleep floated about him ; 
and sometimes the clouds “would open and show 
riches ready to drop upon ” him. There was a 
sweet enchantment in the air to which the dullest 
could not be indifferent. It hovered over us like 
some finer beauty, just beyond the vision of sense, 
and yet as real, almost as tangible, as the things we 
touched and saw. 

Alone as we were upon the little island, we felt 
the diviner world of which that tiny bit of earth 
was part ; we knew the higher beauty of which all 
that visible loveliness was but a sign and symbol. 
The song of the sea, breathed from we knew not 
what depths of space, was not more real than this 
melody, haunting the island and dropping from the 


182 


UNDER THE TREES. 


air like blossoms from a ripening tree. Turn where 
we would, this music went with us; it mingled with 
the murmur of the trees ; it blended with the limpid 
note of the rivulet ; it melted with the breeze that 
swept across the grassy places. All day, and for 
many another day, we were conscious of a larger 
world of harmony and beauty folding in our little 
world of tree and soil ; we lived in it as freely and 
made it ours as fully as the bit of earth beneath our 
feet. Through all our talk this thread of melody 
was run, and our very thoughts were set to this un- 
failing music. In those days the Poet wrote no 
verses ; what need of verse when poetry itself, that 
deep and breathing beauty of the soul of things, 
filled every hour and overflowed all the channels of 
thought and sense ! 

But if we were dumb in the hearing of a music 
beyond our mastery, we were not blind to the 
parable conveyed in every sound and sight ; in 
those delicious days and nights a great truth 
cleared itself forever in our minds. We know 
henceforth how all dream-worlds, all beautiful 
hopes and visions and ideals, are fashioned. They 
are not of human making ; they but make visible 
things which already exist unseen ; they but make 
audible sounds which are already vocal unheard. 
He who dreams, sleeps, and another fills the cham- 
ber of his brain with moving figures ; he who aspires, 
hopes and believes, unlocks the door, and another 
world, already furnished with beauty, lies before 


AN UNDISCOVERED ISLAND . 183 

him. Our ideals are God’s realities. We build 
the new worlds of our knowledge out of the dust of 
worlds already swinging in space ; the stately 
homes of our imagination rise on foundations of 
the common earth. Prospero’s island was made of 
common soil ; flowers, trees, and grass grow on it 
as they grow about the homes of work and care. 
The same sea washes its shores which beats upon 
the coasts of ancient continents ; over it bends 
that same sky which enfolds all the generations of 
men. Prospero’s island is no mirage, hovering 
unreal and evanescent on the far horizon ; no im- 
palpable phantom of reality floating like some 
strayed flower on the lovely sea of dreams. It is 
as solid as the earth, as real as the soul that fash- 
ioned it. No miracle was wrought, no law violated, 
in its making. Beautiful, true, and enduring, it lies 
upon the waters ; a haven for men in the storms 
that beat upon the high seas of this troubled life. 
That which is strange and wonderful about it is the 
music which forever hovers about it ; that which 
makes it enchanted ground is the sound of voices 
sweet as the quietness of sleep, the vision of clouds 
ready to drop unmeasured riches ! An island solid 
as the great world out of which it was fashioned, 
but sweet with heavenly voices and sublime with 
heavenly visions — such is the island of Prospero’s 
enchantments. 

And such are all true ideals, dreams, and aspira- 
tions. They have their roots in the same earth 


1 84 UNDER THE TREES . 

whence the commonest weed grows ; but the light 
and life of the heavens are theirs also. In them 
the visible and the invisible are harmonized ; in 
them the real finds its completion in the ideal- 
The common earth is common only to those who 
are deaf to the voices and blind to the visions 
which wait on it and make its flight a music and 
its path a light. Out of these common things the 
great artists build the homes of our souls. Rock- 
founded are they, and broad-based on our mother 
earth : but they have windows skyward, and there, 
above the tumult of the little earth, the great worlds 
sing. 


iv. 

You do yet taste 

Some subtilities o’ the isle, that will not let you 
Believe things certain. 

One brilliant morning, the sky cloudless and the 
sea singing under a freshening wind, we sat under 
a great tree, with a bit of soft sward before us, and 
talked of Prospero. In that place the master pres- 
ence was always with us ; there was never an hour 
in which we did not feel the spell of his creative 
spirit. We were always secretly hoping that w^e 
should come upon him in some secluded place, his 
staff unbroken, and his book undrowned. But what 
need had we of sight while the island encompassed 
us and the multitudinous music filled the air ? 


an UNDISCOVERED ISLAND. 185 

On that fair morning the magical beauty of the 
world possessed us, and our talk, blending uncon- 
sciously with the music of the invisible choir, was 
broken by long pauses. The Poet was saying that 
the world thought of Prospero as a magician, a 
wonder-worker, whose thought borrowed the fleet- 
ness of Ariel, whose staff unleashed the tempest 
and sent it back to its hiding-place when its work 
was done, and in whose book were written all 
manner of charms and incantations. This was the 
Prospero whom Caliban knew, and this is the Pros- 
pero whom the world remembers. “ For myself,” 
said he, “ I often try to forget the miracles, so 
stained and defiled seem the great artists by this 
homage which is only another form of materialism. 
The search for signs and wonders is always vulgar ; 
it defiles every great spirit who compromises with 
it, because it puts the miracle in place of the truth. 
That which gives a wonder its only dignity and sig- 
nificance is the spiritual power which it evidences 
and the spiritual knowledge which it conveys. To 
the greatest of teachers this hunger for miracles was 
a bitter experience ; he who came with the mystery 
of the heavenly love in his soul must have felt de- 
filed by the homage rendered as to a necromancer, 
a doer of strange things. The curiosity which 
draws men to the masters of the arts has no real 
honor in it ; the only recognition which is real and 
lasting is that which springs from the perception of 
truth and beauty disclosed anew in some noble 


i8 6 


UNDER THE TREES. 


form. Prospero was a magician, but he was much 
more and much greater than a wonder-worker ; not 
Caliban, but Ferdinand and Miranda and Gonzalo, 
are the true judges of his power. Prospero was the 
master spirit of the world which moved about him. 
He alone knew its secret and used its forces ; on 
him alone rested the government of this marvelous 
realm. His command had stirred the seas and sent 
the winds abroad which brought Milan and Naples 
within his hand ; at his bidding the isle was full of 
sounds ; Ariel served him with tireless devotion ; 
he read the sweet thought that flashed from Mir- 
anda to Ferdinand ; he unearthed the base con- 
spiracy of Caliban, Trinculo, and Stephano ; he 
read the treacherous hearts of Antonio and Sebas- 
tian ; in his hand all these threads were gathered, 
and upon all these lives his will was imposed. In 
that majestic drama of human character and action, 
powers of air and earth, the highest and the lowest 
alike serving, it is a lofty soul and a noble mind 
possessed by a great purpose, which control and tri- 
umph. The magical arts are simply the means by 
which a great end is served ; when the work is ac- 
complished, the staff will be broken and the book 
sunk beneath the sea, lower than any sounding of 
plummet.” 

“Yes,” said Rosalind impulsively, carrying the 
thought another step forward, “ Prospero deals with 
natural, substantial things for great, real ends, not 
with magical powers for fantastic purposes. When 


AN UNDISCOVERED ISLAND. 


187 


it falls in his way, he evokes forces so unusual that 
they seem supernatural to those who do not 
understand his power, but the end which lies be- 
fore him is always real, enduring, and noble ; 
something which belongs to the eternal order of 
things.” 

“ For that matter,” I interrupted, “ it grows more 
and more difficult to distinguish between the forces 
and the achievements that we have thought real and 
possible, and those which have seemed only dreams 
and visions. Men are doing things every day by 
mechanical agencies which the most famous of the 
old magicians failed to accomplish. The visions of 
great minds are realities discovered a little in ad- 
vance of their universal recognition.” 

“ As I was saying,” continued the Poet, “ most 
men hold Prospero to be a mert wonder-worker, a 
magician who puts his arts on and off with his 
robe ; they do not know that he stands for the 
greatest force in the world. For the Imagination is 
not only the inspiring leader of men in their strange 
journey through life, but their nearest, most con- 
stant, and most practical helper and sustainer. 
That our souls would have starved without the 
imagination we are all, I think, agreed ; without 
Imagination we should have seen and remembered 
nothing on our long journey but the path at our 
feet. The heavens above us, the great, mysterious 
world about us, would have meant no more to us 
than to the birds and the beasts that have perished 


UNDER THE TREES. 


1 88 

without thought or memory of the beauty which 
has encompassed them. All this the Imagination 
has interpreted for us. It has fashioned life for us, 
and the dullest mind that plods and counts and 
dies is ministered to and enriched by it. It does 
magical things. It puts on its robe and opens its 
book, and straightway the heavens rain melody and 
drop riches upon us. But this is its play. In these 
displays of its art it hints at the resources at its 
command, at the marvels it will yet bring to pass. 
Meanwhile it has made the earth hospitable for us 
and taught men how to live above the brutes.” 

The Poet stopped, abruptly, as if he had been 
caught in the act of preaching, and Rosalind gave 
the sermon a delightful ending. 

“ I wonder,” she said, “ if love would be possible 
without the Imagination? For the heart of love is 
the perception of a deep and genuine fellowship of 
the soul, and the end of love is the happiness which 
comes through ministry. Could we understand a 
human soul or serve it if the Imagination did not 
aid us with its wonderful light ? Is it not the Im- 
agination which enables me to put myself in an- 
other’s place, and so to sympathize with anoth- 
er’s sorrow and share another’s joy ? Could a man 
feel the sufferings of a class or a race or the world 
if the Imagination did not open these things to 
him ? And if he did not understand, could he 
serve?” 

No one answered these questions, for they made 


AN UNDISCOVERED ISLAND. 


189 


us aware on the instant how dependent are all the 
deep and beautiful relations of life on this wonder- 
ful faculty. But for this “ master light of all our 
seeing,” how small a circle of light would lie about 
our feet, how vast a darkness would engulf the 
world ! 


v. 

O wonder ! 

How many goodly creatures are there here ! 

How beauteous mankind is ! O brave new world, 

That has such people in’t ! 

We had never thought of the island in the old 
days save as lashed by tempests ; but now the suns 
rose and set, dawn wore its shining veil and night 
its crest of stars, and not a cloud darkened the sky; 
we seemed to be in the heart of a vast and change- 
less calm. There was no monotony in the 
unbroken succession of the days, but the changes 
were wrought by light, not by darkness. The sing- 
ing of the sea, never rising into those shrill upper 
notes which bode disaster, nor sinking into the deep 
lower tones through which the awful thunder of the 
elements breaks, came to us as out of the depths of 
an infinite repose. The youth of an untroubled 
world was in it. The joy of effortless activities 
breathed through it. We felt that we were once 
more in the morning of the world’s day, and hope 
gave the keynote to all our thought. Life is di- 


190 


UNDER THE TREES. 


vided between hope and memory ; when memory 
holds the chief place, the shadows are lengthening 
and the day declining. 

It was one of the pleasures of the island that 
we were alone upon it. There was no trace of 
any other human occupation, although we never 
forgot those who had been before us in these 
enchanting scenes. One morning, when we had 
been talking about the delight of seclusion, Rosa- 
lind said that, although the silence and repose 
were really medicinal, people had never seemed so 
attractive to her as now when she remembered 
them under the spell of the island. It seemed to 
her, as she recalled them now, that the dull people 
had an interest of their own, the vulgar people 
were not without dignity, nor the bad people with- 
out noble qualities. The Poet, who had evidently 
been giving himself the luxury of dreaming, declared 
that we cannot know people save through the 
Imagination, and that lack of Imagination is at 
the bottom of all pessimism in philosophy, religion, 
and personal experience. A fact taken by itself 
and detached from the whole of which it is 
part is always hard, bare, repellant ; it must be 
seen in its relations if one would perceive its 
finer and inner beauty ; and it is the Imagination 
alone which sees things as a whole. The theologi- 
ans who have stuck to what they call logic have 
spread a veil of sadness over the world which the 
poets must dissipate. “ I do not mean,” he added. 


AN UNDISCOVERED ISLAND. 191 

“ that there are not somber and terrible aspects of 
life, but that these things have been separated from 
the whole, and discerned only in their bare and 
crushing isolated force. The real significance of 
things lies in their interpretation, and the Imagina- 
tion is the only interpreter.” 

I had often had the same thought, and found 
infinite consolation in it ; indeed, I rested in it so 
securely that I would trust myself with far more 
confidence to the poets than to the logicians. The 
guess of a great poetic mind has as solid ground 
under it as the speculation of a scientist ; it differs 
from the scientific theory only in that it is an in- 
duction from a greater number of significant facts. 
The Imagination follows the arc until it “ comes 
full circle”; observation halts and waits for fur- 
ther sight. 

Rosalind thought it very beautiful that Miranda’s 
first glance at men should have discovered them so 
fair and noble ; there was evil enough in some of 
them, but standing beside Prospero Miranda saw 
only the “ brave new world.” I remembered at 
that moment that even Caliban discloses to the 
Imagination the germ of a human development ; 
has not another poet written his later story and 
recorded the birth of his soul ? It was character- 
istic of Rosalind that she should see the people in 
the marvelous drama through Miranda’s eyes, and 
that straightway the whole world of men and women 
should reveal itself to her in a new light. “ To see 


192 


UNDER THE TREES . 


the good in people,” she said, “ is not so much a 
matter of charity as of justice. Our judgments of 
others fail oftenest through lack of Imagination. 
We fail to see all the facts ; we see one or two very 
clearly, and at once form an opinion. To see the 
whole range of a human character involves an intel- 
lectual and spiritual quality which few of us possess. 
There is so little justice among us because we pos- 
sess so little intelligence. I ought not to pronounce 
judgment on a fellow-creature until I know all that 
enters into his life ; until I can measure all the 
forces of temptation and resistance ; until I can 
give full weight to all the facts in the case. In 
other words, I am never in a position to judge 
another.” 

The Poet evidently assented to this statement, 
and I could not gainsay it ; is there not the very 
highest authority for it ? The time will come when 
there will be a universal surrender of that authority 
which we have been usurping all these centuries. 
We shall not cease to recognize the weakness and 
folly of men, but we shall cease to decide the exact 
measure of personal responsibility. That is a func- 
tion for which we were never qualified ; it is a task 
which belongs to infinite wisdom. The Imagination 
helps us to understand others because it reveals the 
vast compass of the influences that converge on every 
human soul like the countless rivulets that give the 
river its volume and impetus. To look at men and 
women through the vision of the Imagination is to 


AN UNDISCOVERED ISLAND. J93 

see a very different race than that which meets our 
common sight. To this larger vision, within which 
the past supplements the present, the great army of 
men and women moves to a solemn and appealing 
music. The pathos of life touches them with an 
indescribable dignity ; the work of life gives them 
an unspeakable nobility. Under the meanest ex- 
terior there are one knows not what tragedies of 
denied hopes and unappeased longings ; behind the 
mask of evil there shines one knows not what 
struggling virtue overborne by impulses that flow 
from the past like irresistible torrents. Hidden 
under all manner of disguises — weakness, poverty, 
ignorance, vulgarity — there waits a world of ideals 
never realized but never lost ; the fire of aspiration 
burns in a thousand thousand souls that are maimed 
and broken, bruised and baffled, but which still sur- 
vive. Is not this the unquenchable spark that some 
day, in freer air, shall break into white flame? It 
is the Imagination only that discerns in a thousand 
contradictions, a thousand obscurities, the large de- 
sign to be revealed when the ring of the hammer 
has ceased, the dust of toil been laid, the scaffold- 
ing removed, and the finished structure suddenly 
discloses the miracle wrought among those who 
were blind. 


194 


UNDER THE TREES. 


VI. 


I might call him 

A thing divine ; for nothing natural 

I ever saw so noble. 

Rosalind was deeply interested in Prospero; 
and when the Poet and I had talked long and ea- 
gerly about him, she often threw into the current 
some comment or suggestion that gave us quite 
another and clearer view of his genius and work. 
But at heart Rosalind’s chief interest was in Mir- 
anda and Ferdinand. The presence of Prospero 
had given the island a solemn and far-reaching 
significance in the geography of the world ; Mir- 
anda and Ferdinand had left an unfailing and be- 
guiling charm about the place. If we could have 
known the point where these two fresh and un- 
spoiled natures met, I am confident we should have 
stayed there by common but unspoken consent. 
After all our discoveries in this mysterious world, 
youth and love remain the first and sweetest in our 
thoughts : there is nothing which takes their place, 
nothing which imparts their glow, nothing which 
conveys such deep and beautiful hints of the 
better things to be. Miranda had known no 
companionship but her father’s, no world but the 
sea-encircled island, no life but the secluded and 
eventless existence in that wave-swept solitude. 
She had had the rare good fortune to ripen under 
the spell of pure, high thoughts, and so near to 


AN UNDISCOVERED ISLAND. 195 

Nature that no grosser currents of influence had 
borne her away from the most wholesome and con- 
soling of all companionships. Ferdinand came 
from the shows of royalty and small falsities of 
courtiers ; the palace, the city, the crowded, self- 
seeking, hypocritical world had encompassed him 
from youth, robbed him of privacy, cheated him of 
that repose which brings a man to a knowledge of 
himself, and despoils him of those sweet and tran- 
quilizing memories which grow out of a quiet child- 
hood as the wild flowers spring along the edges of 
the woods. 

Coming, one from the stillness of a solitary island 
and the other from the roar and rush of a court and 
a city, these two met, and there flashed from one to 
the other that sudden and thrilling intelligence 
which on the instant gives life a new interpreta- 
tion and the world an all-conquering loveliness. 
Nowhere, surely, has the eternal romance found 
more significant setting than on this magical island, 
about which sea and sky, day and night, weave and 
weave again those vanishing webs of splendor in 
which daybreak and evening stars are snared ; with 
such music throbbing on the air as invisible spirits 
make when the command of the master is on 
them ! Here, surely, was the home of this drama 
of the soul, the acting of which on the troubled 
stage of life is a perpetual appeal to faith and hope 
and joy ! For youth and love are shining words in 
the vocabulary of the Imagination — words which 


196 


UNDER THE TREES. 


contain the deepest of present and predict the 
sweetest of future happiness. So deeply inter- 
woven is the real significance of these words with 
the Imagination that, separated from it, they lose 
all their magical glow and beauty. Youth moves 
in no narrow territory ; its boundary lines fade out 
into infinity. It feels no iron hand of limitation ; 
it discerns no impassable wall of restriction. Life 
stretches away before and about it limitless as space 
and full of unseen splendors as the stars that crowd 
and brighten it. The great wings of hope, un- 
bruised yet by any beatings of the later tempests, 
shine through the air, lustrous and tireless, as if all 
flights were possible. And far off, on the remote 
horizon lines where sight fails, the mirage of dreams 
dissolves and reappears in a thousand alluring 
forms. 

Love knows even less of limitation and infirmity. 
Its eyes, sometimes oblivious of the things most ob- 
vious, pierce the remotest future, read the inner- 
most soul, discern the last and highest fruitions. 
The seed in its hand, hard, black, unbroken, is 
already a flower to its thought ; out of the bare, 
stern facts of the present its magical touch brings 
one knows not what of joy and loveliness. And 
when youth and love are one, the heavens are not 
bright enough for their thoughts, nor eternity long 
enough for their deeds. Amid the shadows of life 
they seem to have caught a momentary radiance 
from beyond the clouds ; amid sorrows and sins and 


AN UNDISCOVERED ISLAND . 


197 


all manner of weariness they are the recurring 
vision and revelation of the eternal order. All the 
world waits on them and rejoices in them ; and the 
bitter knowledge of what lies before the eager feet, 
waiting with passionate hope on the threshold, does 
not lessen the perennial interest in that fair picture; 
for in youth and love are realized the universal 
ideals of men. Youth and love are the mortal syno- 
nyms of immortality ; all that freshness of spirit, 
buoyancy of strength, energy of hope, boundless- 
ness of joy, completeness and glory of life, imply, 
are typified in these two things, always vanishing 
and yet always reappearing among men. Wearing 
the beautiful masks of youth and love, the gods 
continually revisit the earth, and in their luminous 
presence faith forever rebuilds its shattered tem- 
ples. 

That which makes youth and love so precious to 
us is the play they give to the Imagination ; indeed, 
the better part of them both is compounded of Im- 
agination. The horizons recede from their gaze 
because the second sight of Imagination is theirs — 
that prescience which pierces the mists which en- 
fold us, and discerns the vaster world through 
which we move for the most part with halting feet 
and blinded eyes. Youth knows that it was born 
to life and power and exhaustless resources ; love 
knows tli at it has found and shall forever possess 
those beautiful ideals which are the passion of noble 


natures. 


198 


UNDER THE TREES. 


Are they blind, these flower-crowned, joy-seeking 
figures ; or are we blind who smile through tears at 
their illusions ? On this island there is but one 
answer to that question ; for do we not know that 
they only who believe and trust discern the truth, 
and that to faith and hope alone is true vision 
given? “As yet lingers the twelfth hour and the 
darkness, but the time will come when it shall be 
light, and man will awaken from his lofty dreams 
and find — his dreams all there, and that nothing is 
gone save his sleep.” 


THE END. 




















